I know I should be talking about Syria and I promise I’ll get to it soon. But bear with me. I don’t think this lighthearted post is completely irrelevant to matters at hand.

My latest post attracted at least one member of the Rand militia to the comments section. I was fascinated to see that it contested no point I had made. Instead it went straight for my (fancied) jugular:

Your problem is that you can’t come to terms with the fact that people find more wisdom in Atlas Shrugged than all of your works. Because as you have told us, you are so much smarter than everyone. Show us your picture along with that of the Bitch. Certainly you are confident in your superior looks.

People? Which people? The answer to that question surely might figure into the mix. (I don’t resent Ayn Rand. I disagree with her. The “bitch” nomenclature was not mine; it was Brizoni’s.) But our commenter provides some insight about the question. It’s about looks. Because I published a late photo of her I was implicitly asserting that I was better looking…

She was lovely.

…because after all, that’s what writing is all about, right? How your portrait photo looks on the back cover.

From which I conclude that our commenter is a young thing himself. He’s the product of our new celebrity culture, which equates glamour with authority because there’s no learning left to criticize opponents intelligently or even question the like-minded on their premises and logic. Why celebrity political opinions are now accorded a weight they should never receive. Why Obama gets a pass from the exact 52 percent of the populace who have been hurt the most by his policies. He’s a celebrity, he looks better in a suit than any president since JFK, and the only thing that would improve on his photo appearance would be us in the pic standing next to him. The clincher? Commenter William equates my taunt to Brizoni about being smarter with a mandate for photographic proof of my “superior looks.” Being smarter requires looking smarter or more, uh, comely. Huh?

That would be funny if it weren’t so pitifully ignorant. At the other site, I’ve written abundantly about Rand. (Do an “Advanced Search” at Instapunk for Ayn Rand.) I have acknowledged my own early enthusiasm for her, I have sympathized with the Stalinist youth which catalyzed her radical counter philosophy, I have recommended reading her best novel Anthem, and I have meticulously detailed the intellectual and spiritual reasons why I came ultimately to reject the extremity of her philosophy. I have debated ad nauseam with staunch Rand defenders, who have become increasingly more personal and hostile in their tactics. But along the way I have also defended Brizoni’s right to argue his beliefs against numerous hostile commenters. Nevertheless, I’m the shallow envious one who’s more vain and rigid than thoughtful. Got it.

As far as I’m concerned, the subject is exhausted. There’s nothing nasty or personal in my latest post, even though it’s a rebuttal to a former friend who now desires “a knife in my heart” and presumes to write my obituary as a writer and thinker.

Well, Randians may reject the atheist left, but their tone and tactics are exactly the same. Get personal at once, speak, write louder than your foes, and insist that repeating, repeating, repeating the same tired talking points constitutes winning the argument. It doesn’t. Accuse the other side of monolithic prejudice when every word you pen or utter is precisely that. Opposing you at all is absolute proof of idiocy. Never respond to the substance of arguments but only the straw men you create on the page.

What remains as a basis for discussion? I told Brizoni what would change the discussion in another round of debate. What personal experience has led to this hardening of a philosophical preference into a kind of propaganda war? He ignored that as he has ignored all the points I briefly summarized in the previous post. That’s not a good sign for a human being who insists his understanding of humanity confers on him a superior ability to define a new god-free morality for the rest of us. If you can’t ever come out from behind the curtain of cant and put your wisdom in personal terms, you’re probably just an academic didact. Particularly when your academic CV consists of a hundred video games, one book, and some weirdly necrophile erotomania for its author.

So. You Randians have become the right wing version of the hard American left. And as with them, it’s all reducible by you to a single photograph.

Okay. I may as well conclude the same way. Here’s another pic of the greatest philosopher of all time, one who is greater than Jesus Christ himself.

Again, look at her eyes? Is this the “Thousand Yard Stare” or “The Runaway Bride”? You decide.

And this is me.

See? I was always better looking than Ayn Rand.

You are your own proof that the bitch is wrong. That’s the saddest thing of all.

The bitch in question.

It was the one thing that was different in his presentation. A dare. One I’m inclined to take the more I think of it.

After all, he’s putting her up against the idea of God.

Ridiculous.

I’ve been compared to a dying Ford tractor, incapable of mustering any response. Except, you know, the farting noises of a rusted engine trying to turn over.

Well, I may be old, slow, averse to living in the Mylie Cyrus universe, more content to behold my yard than live in Obama’s America, but that doesn’t mean I’m dead or hiding. It means I’ve chosen differently than those who wish to combat totalitarianism with totalitarianism.

Complete rebuttal. For those who have a grain of sense.

Let’s see. What do we know about human life on earth? Pretty much, the people who know everything, the people who are absolutely sure they know everything about how everyone else should live, are wrong.

The idea of God is the dissent from that kind of arrogance. It’s to say that there’s a standard higher than our smartest smarts. Something about what it means to be good.

It happens early in life. Mothers and fathers teach children what good is and expect their offspring to remember. Am I going too quickly for you?

I’ll try to go slower. Things I’ve said before but have never been understood. Like capitalism and Marxism are both morally neutral in their structural prescriptions, with one exception. Marxism puts people in charge, with an insistence that there is no God. Capitalism also puts people in charge, but it doesn’t say anything at all about whether there’s a God or not.

They’re both just systems of economics. The big difference is that Marxism despises and denies God, and capitalism is neutral on the question.

This is not an inconsequential difference. Any atheist philosophy must establish and maintain authority over the question of what is right and what is wrong. It doesn’t matter how idealistic they are at the onset of this task. What matters is that when morality is left to human hands, corruption, oppression, and totalitarianism become inevitable. No hero leader or human institution can withstand the conversion of simple verities to man-made laws. The law doesn’t ever know where to stop. The leading lights never know when to shut up and let people make up their own minds. As long as morality is strictly a human responsibility, there will be human beings who will play God.

The first proof that the bitch is wrong. Look at that sour face. No laugh lines there. It’s a tough job being a human god. No wiggle room for a wink or a nod at a miracle. There’s this overpowering need to explain and control everything, to be all knowing. You can see it in the writings of most everyone who would do without god. The instantaneous leap from rational reasonableness to certainty and from there to pompous contempt. Why Rand followers past the age of 18 are less a school of philosophy than a cult.

But they’re by no means alone. The second proof that the bitch is wrong. There is no country, no community, no human grouping of any kind that has been modeled on Rand’s philosophy. Not even her own inner circle, which more closely resembled the Obama cult of personality than the airy-fairy utopia she was peddling. You see, politics always intrudes, perverts, and transforms even the noblest ideas to their opposites when all the authority is vested in what purports to be the logic of the “right people.”

Why every nation that has attempted to organize itself as a rational, atheist entity has always ended by slaughtering vast numbers of its people. Right and wrong are never successfully adjudicated by the smart people who insist they know right and wrong better than everyone else. They’re, in fact, the ones least to be trusted. Lenin and Mao, and Robespierre before them, probably did begin as idealists. But they became murderous monsters.

Sadly, we can see their like in today’s leftist egalitarians. A third proof of why the bitch is wrong. The Randians insist that we can trust the human mind, without God, to infer a higher morality implicit in human history and experience. Which is the exact same position taken by the largely atheist lefties who now insist that morality is the purpose of stultifying and destructive political correctness, which is succeeding brilliantly at closing down free speech and gradually transferring moral authority from individuals and families to the state.

The Randians faint response to this is that the lefties have got it all wrong, that a truly rational morality wouldn’t look anything like what the lefties are doing. But who’s to say? In the absence of God as a moral force above mere human beings, morality is in the mouth of the loudest speaker, the smartest lawyer, the most ambitious politician.

Why the genius of the founders established a rule of law that did NOT define itself as absolute justice, but as an aspiration to an impossible ideal of divine justice. Sever that aspiration and everything collapses into gutter fighting over trivia, with far from trivial consequences.

What is right and what is wrong are not political questions. They are cultural questions, meant to be debated away from the rough and tumble of town hall or the market square. And they don’t settle themselves by some magical means, as many rationalists like to assume, because frequently the right answers are hard answers, not ones that would ever be arrived at by the powerful or ambitious expedients. Why we have religions, theologies, and churches to help us remember the important answers so routinely undermined by daily life experience.

The peculiar myopia of the dumb-smart hyper-rationalists is that they observe — acute spectators of the human condition that they are — the existence of religions and religious adherents who answer the questions of right and wrong wrongly. This they would correct with their own right answers about right and wrong. Which requires the abolition of belief in God. But their vision is indeed myopia. The big questions are not settled by a genius at a typewriter or sitting on a throne. They are settled by history. The fourth proof that the bitch is wrong. Of course there are religions which come up with wrong answers. That doesn’t mean religion is evil. No more than crazy political parties mean that democracy is evil. Time is the teacher. But if you have no appreciation of time or tradition, you are almost certainly going to be one of those who learn right and wrong the hard way, er, the worst way, by becoming a victim of divine justice.

The bitch was wrong. Look at her. Seem happy, enlightened, and soaring on the wings of freedom to you? Thought not.

You’ve never seen this kind of display in TV ads, have you? (Start at 5 minutes in.)

If you’ve come here from Instapunk, read what follows all the way through. There’s more here than there.

Let’s face it. Dogs are some of the top sellers in the advertising world. Greyhounds are the most exotic of all dogs, but Madison Avenue has no use for them. Why?

1. People think Golden Retrievers and Yellow Labs are handsome, friendly, and intelligent. But there’s a problem with that. People also think they’re superior to Golden Retrievers and Yellow Labs. You know. And French bulldogs, Boston terriers, and pugs. They make us feel better about ourselves. We love them, they love us. Greyhounds are God’s arrows. They love, but they hold much in reserve. They know who they are. Frequently, they prefer their own company. They make us feel smaller. When they launch, oh, Jesus. We’re just spectators. Not what the ad world wants.

2. Greyhounds don’t do cute things on cue. Not that they don’t do cute things. They do. Mostly when they’re lounging on a couch. They have, well, a conscious relationship with stuffed toys. They don’t chew them. They gather them up and hold them close, sleep next to them. Doesn’t lend itself to 30 seconds of selling somehow.

3. Greyhound faces. A subject unto themselves. Smooth, pop-eyed but not startled, endowed with eyes that see everything, even what we don’t want seen. The faces are blank fronts of bodies usually scarred by their own obsession with speed and our willingness to exploit it. Always open when we talk but so often closed in slumber on the floor or sofa. They don’t show emotion the same way other dogs do. They’re not in the business of reacting to us. No matter how close a bond you have, you will never see it in their faces. You learn it from the need for a greyhound hug, which is usually brief but intense, emotions flowing both ways. You look at them straight on, and you see no emotion except what is in their eyes. Faces mild as children’s dolls. Eyes you can fall into. They can see a change in your expression fifty yards away. Sighthounds. They live through their eyes. Even with you. TV can’t do that.

No God? Really?

4. Beauty. Ads are more about comedy and connection than anything else. Especially when dogs are involved. But greyhounds are principally, overwhelmingly, about beauty and awe. We love the dog in the Traveller’s Insurance ads with the floppy ear and the soulful face. Greyhounds don’t offer that. They stare like impassive gods at everyone who doesn’t have one. They don’t entertain. They just are. And they are everything opposite to advertising — remote, gorgeous, utterly uninterested in seduction or approval. When the moment comes, they will explode into action and chances are, your cameras won’t be able to record that moment with any fidelity. No one can keep up, no one should try, and that’s no way to sell insurance, cosmetics, or Fritos.

Whereas, you can see how winning Scottish deerhounds are in their ads, winsome, engaged with the camera, and all around humorously charming:

Excuse me, Rae? You have a comment?

Like we care.

OH. THE COMPLICATION. Raebert is somehow guarding me. He refuses to leave my side. At all. If he can be induced to go outside, which he can with the leash, he pees and/or poops immediately and returns to me. He insists on lying next to me on the couch, or on top of me. It makes me think I’m ill in some way he knows and I don’t. (Sorry, Brizoni, don’t think it’s so…) It makes me think about what the “next step” might be. Not believing in God because it’s so much easier that way? Or wondering what the fuck is going on with this amazing animal I’ve already been through so much with. One or the other of us is in peril, I’m convinced. I have to tell you I’d prefer his safety to mine. He’s only three.

Not really.

I’ll explain tomorrow.

UPDATE: False alarm. Brizoni had nothing to say, no new argument to make. I responded in the comments at IP.

I’m pretty much sworn against using dumb dog photos. But this one’s, well, the truth. How do you suppress the truth?

We love our pug Eloise. We found her on the side of the road, abandoned on a dangerous stretch. What happened next was a portent we ignored. We approached her like dog lovers approach stranded dogs, gently, speaking soft words, asking her to let us rescue her.

Her response? She took off like a shot, aiming herself mindlessly under the wheels of a giant SUV, which did actually clip her with a front wheel. She was hurled across the road, suffering multiple cuts and bruises that enabled us finally to catch her.

That was the day I had to apologize to the driver for what I said when he leaped from his car in horror at what he had done. (Yes, I do know when I need to apologize.) That was also the day, after lots of frantic driving around, we found our current vet facility. We’ve gone nowhere else since. So that’s to the good.

But then there’s Eloise. We got her right after returning from our honeymoon. I grew up with smart dogs, shepherds and terriers. Lady Laird as a rescuer of greyhounds was used to dogs that are, uh, not too bright. Neither of us was prepared for the pinnacle of stupidity represented by pugs.

What did we know? We watched Animal Planet documentaries about pugs. They were, well, baffling. The owners clearly loved them, made them the center of their lives, lavished all kinds of love (and outfits) on them, but it always seemed like they were winking at the camera, that there was some secret only pug afficianados would ever understand.

Almost ten years in, we know what that secret is. Pugs are not the sharpest knife in the drawer, they’re not the sharpest nail, pencil, crayon in the box, not the brightest bulb in the pack, not the fastest car in the lot, not the heaviest hammer in the toolbox… Oh Stop!

They’re the absolute dumbest dog in the world. All these years in, Eloise will still knock over her food bowl trying to evade having you attach her leash while she’s eating. Subsequently, she will get herself wound around furniture, steps, anything in the landscape and then rush at you frantically bug-eyed while you try to untangle her, which she will most often sabotage with renewed efforts to ensnarl herself.

None of this is meant to say we don’t love her or that we would ever give her away. It’s just that we’re bewildered. Pugs have a cult following. People who are clearly committed to getting pug after pug after pug, as if they were the answer to some question heterosexuals should be asking themselves.

We won’t be getting another pug when, and if, we survive Eloise. We’d get a Boston terrier, physically similar but smart as a whip and with excellent manners to boot.

There are lots of shows about dogs and which ones to get. Why I felt some responsibility. What they say about pugs is mostly true. Generally healthy, faithful companions, incredibly grateful for human contact, fine with children, and cute as a button, all of them.

But if it matters to you — and maybe it doesn’t — the average fence post is not as dumb as a pug.

You won’t believe it but he was first spotted at a Schwabb’s drugstore in Villanova PA by Fox News Channel’s veteran weatherman/political scientist/pundit/talent scout Steve Doocy. His meteoric rise since then has taken the world of fake journalism by storm.

Help me out here. I’m having this recurring nightmare. I close my eyes and the show begins:

“This is Special Report with Peter Doocy. I’m your host Peter Doocy. On tonight’s program we’ll get reports on the inner workings of the Egyptian civil war from our senior foreign correspondent Peter Doocy. Next we’ll turn to the intricate machinations of the federal budget and the accounting tricks being used to paper over the deficit. Forensic financial correspondent Peter Doocy will give us the inside dope. Then we’ll analyze the early presidential horse race in Iowa and New Hampshire with veteran political analyst Peter Doocy.

“We’ll discuss these and other issues with our expert panel later in the show, which tonight consists of Peter Doocy, editor emeritus of the Villanova student newspaper, as well as military tactics expert Peter Doocy and resident Fox News economist Peter Doocy.

“We’ll close with some funny and embarrassing man in the street interviews conducted by Fox feature columnist Peter Doocy.”

What is he, 23, 24? At Villanova he majored in what, spelling? Somebody help me. It’s like a song I can’t get out of my head. A song I not only don’t like but hated the first time I heard it.

The corporate guys are sure about the demographics, but Raebert knows they’re idiots. She’s unique.

Why this post? Because life is mysterious. The old guys see a canvas crazed with crackled lines they want to interpret. Not what Raebert sees. He can ken the whole woman, no matter how many years ago she lived. Why he spends so much time dreaming.

He wants to be there when she showers.

Have we mentioned that deerhounds aren’t quite dogs? Why they’re so utterly awful to live with. They’re inside your soul, your past, and probably your rotten fate. And they’re not even smug about it. Just weary with your sameness. Except for the women. Who are always, as God intended, a joy to all the senses.

She’s beautiful. Takes my breath away. What could possibly be more gorgeous?

Why this post? Because we all need to remember what deerhounds know. No matter what’s happening now, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is a man’s roughly kind hand and the infinite loveliness of human females with no clothes on. And butterscotch krimpets.

They’re like God’s fingers, only with icing.

I’d mention marinara sauce but it’s getting late.

The Brizene Creed. Don’t parse. I’m just smarter than you. Get used to it. Well, yeah. HER creed too. We’re so hot together you wouldn’t believe it. “I love idiots with hard-ons,” she says. Love her to death. Except that Ayn Rand IS stone cold dead.

I believe in myself absolutely, alone and without resort. I believe in no father, no creator, no savior, no designer of earth.

I am therefore entitled to tell others what to believe, since there is nothing to believe, and I might as well be the one to make it up for them.

This is obviously the right way to go, me being the one to tell everyone else how to live, since morals are implicit in the essential logic of the universe. Have you read my explanation of the exact month and week it’s okay to commit abortions up to? It’s brilliant. I’m Brizoni and I have looked into the void of existence and I know there’s no God.

Let me start again. I am Brizoni. There is no God. I am happy. I am happy. I am happy, god damn you.

I am Brizoni. I’d be happier if all of you would give up your superstitious, bullshit beliefs. Especially the ones who know ten times about history what I do. Because only I know how derelict, empty, and awful your beliefs are in the context of history I’ve never had the time or inclination to learn.

I am Brizoni. I know fucking everything. I read a book once. She was hot. I imagine myself fucking Dagny on a rail car right before we fly away from the dying lights of New York and watch the civilization you fools cling to fade, fade away into the dark.

I am Brizoni. I am Atlas. I am shrugging. You’re all idiots.

I am Brizoni. I am the fountainhead of a new birth of civilization. I am the entire replacement for what you all yearn for in a God. Because I can explain everything, and I once wrote an essay about it that convinced me. QED. Hell, if you can convince me, you’re hot shit.

I am Brizoni. Why wouldn’t that ever be enough for anybody?

Amen.

He wasn’t what you’d call an “eminence grise” of journalism.

The post I wanted to do when I started this morning. Felt I had to dispose of Syria first, which I’ve done more briefly and effectively than the million words I’ve seen written so far. And then there was the (dud) Brizoni underwear bomb, which also had to be dealt with.

Sigh.

Back to David Frost. He’s dead. An opportunity for consideration of the frailties of both cultural and personal memory. Isn’t that more interesting than pounding punditry about the farce American foreign policy has become?

His American obits focused exclusively on his interviews of Richard Nixon, as if that’s what should be engraved on his tombstone. What I remembered too. There was a movie with Anthony Hopkins playing Nixon and someone else playing Frost, and all I knew from the fact of having lived through it was that the movie was a hagiographic fake — of Frost, not Nixon, obviously. And I resented it. A resentment conferred unfairly on Frost in retrospect, in fact vicariously.

Which means that for all my hyper consciousness about the duplicity of the MSM, I am still prey to what the MSM do and by no means immune to their packaging of reality.

[I haven’t looked up his bio because I’m trying to remember what I can remember, not fit memories to facts I never had. Although I’ll make a partial exception later.]

Part of my resentment was that I remembered Frost as a particularly stereotypical Brit presenter. Lower class London accent spiffed up to include concluding T’s and the otherwise missing ends of words generally. Always thought Steve Coogan’s brilliantly cruel spoof of the type in his “Alan Partridge” incarnation was largely if not wholly inspired by David Frost:

Sorry. For a long time Frost had a talk show aired in the United States. He was the Jon Gruden of talk show hosts. Every guest was the greatest, most talented, most wonderful light ever to shine on the celebrity stage. Then, suddenly, when he too had long disappeared from public view (like Alan Partridge), there he was talking oh so earnestly to Richard Nixon with the same clipboard he’d always had to remind him where he was and who he was talking to (usually Marlo Thomas. Fan-TAS-tic!). When did he become Cronkite, Severaid, Brinkley, Murrow, or Lowell Thomas? When it served the purpose of the MSM, that’s when.

Case closed. I revisited my Jon Gruden circus act.

My wife just wanted, quite understandably, to watch a football game without having the experience ruined by her husband. I plead guilty with extenuating circumstances. My impersonation of Jon Gruden is spot on, and most of you would enjoy a few minutes of it, as did my wife the first time she heard it. I draw on my knowledge of the dactylic nature of glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) to imbue my performance with satiric cruelty, which amuses the performer no end and ultimately bores the listener into a coma because once started — just like glossolalia — it just keeps going, impossible to stop.

One can become formulaic in one’s views.

What I remember. The incantational rhetoric of David Frost. Never gave him a second thought. Just another partridge on the wing, flapping rhythmically.

Frost with Nixon was a reason to dismiss a whole life. Which I did when I heard he was dead on the move at the age of 74.

And I was wrong. Not just for what I didn’t know. But for what I’d forgotten. That’s the most discomfiting thing. I knew there was more to David Frost. It was the first thing I’d ever known about him. And I forgot it.

When I was a kid, my dad couldn’t watch the news on TV. Three networks, giant egos pontificating and slanting the news leftward on each. So serious, so sure, so pompously, stultifyingly final. He had only two outlets. a fifteen minute broadcast once a week by Fulton J. Lewis. Which I’ve remembered before. And, when it came along on Channel 12, a bizarre news satire from Britain called “That Was the Week That Was.”

This was actually the first time that the edifice of television news had ever been mocked. Fifty years before there was Jon Stewart, there was TWTWTW, and my dad was a fan. They made fun of everyone, left and right, but my dad loved it anyway because they were puncturing the balloon of swollen journalistic egos. It was finally okay to laugh.

I remembered that because my personal memory is so searching and comprehensive that I couldn’t not remember it. Horseshit. I forgot it until I chanced to see a Monty Python documentary this morning, part one of six, called “The Not Very Interesting Beginnings.” Of the Monty Python troupe in case you were still wondering. I’m not even going to claim serendicity. I think the IFC network knew they were adding a timely bit of biography to a skewed and truncated obit of David Frost.

They go on. And on. They converge on a tosser named David Frost, the negligible commoner who finally put them all together. Go figure.

If so, I thank them. I got it. Without the money-grubbing, nonjournalist, low class opportunist named David Frost, there would never have been a Monty Python Flying Circus. Its upper-upper class cast of three from Cambridge, two from Oxford, and one from America’s boutique Occidental College would never have had the opportunity to write together, gell into a primal cultural force, and knock over every lamp in western civilization’s hotel room.

The sad thing, the truly saddest thing, is that they have no comedic heirs. Comedians today are following their fancied lead, but they are knocking down what has already been knocked down. Now they are trampling on ruins.

We need a new Monty Python. Unafraid to take on political correctness, the nanny state, and glowering totaliarianism. Which means, maybe, we also need a new David Frost to find and unleash that kind of talent on the status quo. Is that why the MSM fail to remember the truly glorious contribution he made? Or are they just too damn dumb to know what happened way back when? I know where my bet is placed. You?

So, God bless David Frost. I will say what I should have said a day ago: Good man. I will miss you.

Poor sonofabitch. His Rand called him home way too young.

Brizoni has inserted a comment on an earlier post. He picks up right where he left off.

Some may be tempted to engage him, and you are welcome to do so. I do not begrudge the comment space. Just be advised that even after all these months of stony silence, he is just as rigid, scornful, patronizing, and hypocritical as he was when last when we heard from him.

Hypocritical? Indeed. He has always had the keys to Instapunk. If he were working to save the world as he indicts us for failing to do… If he had a case to make beyond fire and brimstone sermons against those who have not converted to his monolithically Old Testament commandments on the nature of reality… If he had any power whatsoever left to communicate rather than condemn… We would have seen him mount the empty pulpit that had a built-in audience of those whom he needs most, the politically like minded who still don’t get why we must be God-haters to defeat the God-haters who are carrying our country, or culture, and our civilization into ruin.

But he’s been a silent boy.

All I’m saying is, choose your battles wisely. Frequently, the prodigal who returns still needs a lesson. But are you and I obligated to be the ones to provide it?