Shots In The Dark

At this hilarious website, which allows you to string together blocks of text actually spoken by George W. Bush, and then plays them back for you. Hey, it sounds about as coherent as the real thing.....

...I'm really missing Jerry Garcia this morning.

...the Chronicle of Higher Education. Julia M. Klein writes about the latest stream of books dealing with the questions of Harvard and meritocracy. I'll have to write about this sometime, as I think Harvard gets something of a bum rap on the "it lacks socioeconomic diversity" question. I challenge anyone to go to a Harvard commencement, look around at the composition of the student body, and tell me what university can match that—regardless of its admission standards.

A more important issue, I think, is how Harvard takes a diverse group and makes it homogenous in some profound (and to my mind, depressing) ways.

There's also a nice reference to Harvard Rules in this month's Boston magazine, featuring my Yale college classmate, chef Ming Tsai, on the cover.... It's not online, but inside the magazine it's in a piece about Harvard admissions called "The Keys to the Kingdom."

Sometimes I think that the comments people leave get unduly overlooked...and so, starting now, from time to time I'm going to highlight your comments on the regular blog.

Here's one from a person who disagrees with me about Gawker:

You are missing the point of Gawker...of course it is snarky and obnoxious, but it is also funny as hell and a breath of fresh air in our PC world. It is the same point people always miss when talking about Howard Stern. He is gross and vile, but most importantly he is funny. People wouldn't listen to him if he wasn't and they wouldn't read any of Nick Denton's blogs if they weren't either.

And here's my response:

I disagree. I'm a big fan of Howard Stern—I think he's really smart—and I don't think that he and Gawker have much in common. For one thing, Stern is never mean. He may give people a hard time, but deep down, you know he's a nice guy. The people at Gawker, on the other hand, are just bitter and nasty. Howard has a heart; Gawker has only bile.

Also, Howard makes sure to take his shots at people who are powerful or pompous or take themselves too seriously.

Yeah, Gawker does that too, sometimes. But sometimes Gawker just picks on people because it can—like the "secretary" reading her book. That's not standing up to PC-ness. That's just crummy.

Finally, whatever else you want to say about Howard, he puts himself out there. He says what he says to people's faces, and he's not afraid to make a fool of himself either. (Fartman comes to mind.)

The people at Gawker hide behind the anonymity of the Internet. They don't have a fraction of Howard's guts. Do you think they'd write what they write if they had to say it to people's faces? Not a chance.

Your thoughts?

'I have a problem with the term African American...The word negro is a perfectly good word. There is nothing wrong with that'

Andy Rooney on Imus 11/4/05, MSNBC, 8:45am ET

*Thanks to the Drudge Report...for the quote and the font.

Anyone who has ever tried without success to get the New York Times to issue a correction—no matter how blatant the mistake—will appreciate Mickey Kaus' hilarious deconstruction of Nicholas Kristof's absurd self-correction....

Why is it so hard for people at the Times to admit when they're wrong?

Not only is it snarky, it's snobby. Here the editors of Gawker express their amazement on seeing "this middle-aged woman—we'd describe her as, um, secretarial—with her face shoved in a book."

The book was James Frey's memoir of drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces.

Writes Gawker, "We didn’t quite believe what we saw; this woman was, after all, sporting a nicely teased helmet head and conservative Easy Spirit flats."

But then it's all explained for Gawker's fearless sleuth, who peers closer and sees that the book bears the seal of Oprah's Book Club.

Um...Gawker? People have been reading books they might not otherwise have read for years because of Oprah. That's kind of the point.

Even if they happen to fit your stereotype of secretaries....

Three years after his departure from Harvard, Cornel West is profiled by the Harvard Crimson, which finds him much the same as I did when I interviewed West for Harvard Rules.

(Coming out soon in a snazzy new paperback, by the way.)

As always, West is unapologetic, energetic, and controversial. At Princeton, some students don't think much of his politics or his extracurricular activities (although he wouldn't think of them as extracurricular; to West, everything he does is about education).

But the piece also emphasizes West's close relationship with the students who take his class. Every week after class, the students and he all go out to lunch together.

I smiled when I read that, remembering that one of Larry Summers' criticisms of West was that he didn't devote enough time to teaching. Is there a single tenured Harvard professor who lunches with his or her students every week? (If ever?)

Much less interesting, by the way, is this Crimson profile of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which sounds like it was more or less dictated by Gates.... Daniel J. Mendel argues that, as Gates steps down from the chairmanship of African and African-American Studies, "the department is sturdier than ever."

Well...no. It isn't. Gates is a master of spin, and he has done enormous things for his field. But despite his marketing genius, his department hasn't regained its former stature or momentum.

One of the reasons I like Arianna Huffington is that she's absolutely fearless, and never hesitates to make enemies out of the standard Washington types she's likely to bump into at a party or in a green room.

Like here, for instance, where she tears James Carville a new one.

Arianna's critique: Carville is compromised by his marriage to Mary Matalin, a close friend of Scooter Libby, and so he keeps turning the conversation away from Plamegate and towards other things; she rather brutally nails him for gassing on about the "Family Medical Leave Act."

Whatever the reason for Carville's odd bloodlessness, Arianna's got a point. It's time for Americans to get passionate about the war and the way it's been conducted. (Secret prisons, anyone?) We're coming to a moment in American politics where passion is going to be voters' measure of a candidate. Dems can't back down now.

That's the conclusion arrived at by authors Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin in their new book, "The Next Attack," reviewed by Michiko in today's Times.

That would be not just the war in Iraq, but the fight against terrorism.

Writes Kakutani: The authors "see more and more Muslims, many of whom had no earlier ties to radical organizations, enlisting in the struggle against the West, and they also point out the proliferation of freelance terrorists, self-starters without any formal ties to Al Qaeda or other organized groups."

And here's a point that I haven't heard made before: Simon and Benjamin "add that 'the sad irony' of the war is that Iraq now stands as an argument against democratization for many in the Middle East: 'the current chaos there confirms the fears of both the rulers and the ruled in the authoritarian states of the region that sudden political change is bound to let slip the dogs of civil war.'"

In other words, the war that was supposed to start the spread of democracy in the Middle East is actually making democracy less likely there.

Whoops!

The Bush administration has 39 months in which to salvage this fight against terrorism that it has mucked up so badly. That's probably not enough time to undo the years of damage, but it could be a start.

I'm not expecting anything, though. Because before beginning to set things right, George Bush and Dick Cheney would have to admit that they got things wrong. And that will never happen.

Alberto Sanchez Pinol's new novel, Cold Skin, is about two men stranded on an island who, every night, take refuge in a lighthouse as they face attack by waves of sea monsters.

Or is it?

Consider this quote about how one of the characters, Gruner, responds to the monsters, who are called Sitauca:

The question was whether, once inside the lighthouse, one felt obliged to find some meaning in the madness. [Gruner] chose to mull away the nights and shun the days. He turned the adversary into savages, transforming a conflict into barbarity, the antagonist into fiend. The paradox was that this reasoning could only be upheld thanks to his inconsistencies. All was utterly consumed by his struggle for survival. The enormity of our peril was such that all discussions were postponed, as if he considered them absurd. And once he was protected behind the barricade of his logic, any further aggression simply confirmed his views. His fear of the Sitauca was the man's one true ally. The closer the Sitauca got to the lighthouse, the more vindicated Gruner felt. And the harsher the attack, the less Gruner would reflect on his own depravity.....

Sound familiar?

David Brooks has written a column (that you can't read online, but it's here) attacking Democratic senator Harry Reid, who has been particularly aggressive in challenging the administration's manipulation of intelligence in the rush to war in Iraq.

It's called "The Harry da Reid Code"—boy, that's clever—and it imagines Reid as a paranoid conspiracy theorist who conveniently ignores the fact that it wasn't just the Bush administration which thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs; the Clintonites did too.

The "they thought so too" argument has become a staple for Bush apologists, so let's dispense with it. (It won't take but a minute.)

Yes, the Clinton administration did think that Hussein possessed WMDs, and it did call for "regime change" in Iraq.

But in the process of beating the war drums, President Bush acquired far more information about what was really happening in that country—for which he deserves credit. Unfortunately, none of that information supported his administration's claims about Hussein's weapons program. Quite the reverse, in fact.

And as Reid and others have pointed out, the issue is not whether the Clinton people were wrong, the issue is whether the Bush folks knew that the information they were promulgating as gospel truth was either shaky or flat-out incorrect.

Moreover, when the Clinton administration called for regime change in Iraq, it did not specify how that change should occur—whether through supporting political dissidents (if there were any), a Kurdish rebellion, harsher sanctions, or invasion by U.S. forces. For a host of reasons, it is unimaginable to think of Bill Clinton starting an unprovoked war. The call for regime change was a policy statement affirming opposition to Saddam Hussein—not a call to arms.

And yet, Brooks mocks Harry Reid, portraying him sitting "alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes."

Huh.

If Harry Reid is paranoid, what would Brooks make of Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and the other war hawks—all of whom were completely paranoid, and completely wrong—if he were to turn a non-partisan eye upon them?

A reporter from the Yale Daily News called me last night to ask my thoughts on Yale's crackdown on drinking at The Game.

Apparently, having written a book on higher education, I am now an alumni expert on binge drinking.

Nonetheless, I was happy to oblige, as I do have strong feelings about drinking and The Game. Which is to say, I am all in favor of it.

Let's just set the scene here. Every year, Yale plays Harvard in both college's last game of the season. Whichever locale hosts the game, the weather is likely to be bitterly cold (though it's usually worse in Cambridge, and Harvard stadium has stone benches that will turn your bum into the kind of ice you used to be able to find in Antartica).

The quality of the football is not, shall we say, high.

I mean, it's high compared to a group of weekend warriors such as myself playing touch football in Central Park. But not really compared to, say, USC vs. Notre Dame.

(Which, don't get me wrong, is a good thing. Ivy League schools shouldn't worry too much about the relative quality of their athletics.)

A few days after the game, students take off for Thanksgiving break.

So The Game is primarily a social event, and for undergraduates, alcohol is a huge part of that. I went to all four Games during my time at Yale, and I can't remember a single play. (I do remember that Yale won the 100th-playing of the Game, but that's about it.)

I do remember getting blotto and having a fantastic time. I remember, for example, my friend Bliss, in a fit of inebriated laughter, toppling over her seat and landing in the lap of not entirely amused art history professor Vincent Scully.

I also remember rolling down a hill with my roommate Eric. Why, I don't know. It was a spontaneous gesture, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Another roommate, Peter, was in the marching band. I think he played the cymbal, an instrument which did not require him to stay sober. Yet another roommate, Tim, was a cheerleader. The primary benefit of this was a) girls (or, in Tim's case, as it turned out, guys) and b) going to Mory's after the games and getting drunk, followed by a power nap, then a second wind.

Yes, a good time was had by all.

None of us ever confused such drunken revelry with the real world; we knew that we were behaving childishly, and that we wouldn't be able to carry on such behavior later. (Apparently, though, we could become president.) Bliss is now a schoolteacher, Eric is a film producer, Tim is the head of a prominent business organization in New York, and Peter is a rabbi.

No one I know ever got hurt from drinking at The Game. And if they did, well, it happens. I'd rather have life with a lot of fun and a little risk than a life with no risk and little fun.

Anyway, I digress. Yale has now cracked down on drinking at The Game, banning drinking games, people standing on the roofs of cars, and tailgates during the second half.

This is, of course, a travesty. Which is pretty much what I told the Yale Daily News. People should have the right to stand on car roofs whenever they want. After all, they paid for the cars.

I do love the alum from the class of '41, though, who says that this isn't a problem for him, because he "wouldn't want to miss the kick-off."

To which I say, the kick-off is a bloody mary at about 10:30 game day morning....

The Boston Globe's Alex Beam raises a good question in his column today: What happened to the $115 million that Oracle founder Larry Ellison was supposed to give to Harvard?

Some background: A number of newspapers reported last spring that Harvard was on the verge of landing the massive gift—it would be Harvard's largest ever—from Ellison, who, like Bill Gates, has become interested in public health. The money would go to establishing a medical database and journal at Harvard's Initiative for Global Health, which is more or less Summers' attempt to put the Harvard School of Public Health out of business. (That's my opinion, not Beam's.) Knowing how hot the field of international health is (cf. Bono, Gates, Sachs, etc.), Summers wanted an organization he could control, funded by big gifts such as Ellison's that would be funneled through his office.

But in the interim, Ellison was forced to settle an insider trading lawsuit by agreeing to give $100 million to charity, and now the gift appears to have been put on hold. Beam quotes one Harvard official saying, 'That put the gift in a complicated light. There was the possibility that the gift sprang not from spontaneous generosity, but as part of the litigation."

To which Beam rightly asks, So? The circumstances of Ellison's case were murky, and Harvard has surely accepted money from dirtier hands than his.

Instead, Beam reports, Harvard "is still negotiating with Ellison in the hopes of landing a donation untainted by the lawsuit. ''We want to see if we can move forward independently of the litigation,' the Harvard official explains.

I can't help but think that there's something else going on here: The publicity that would come from taking the money might include some bad press, but after all, it's $100 million to boost global health efforts—Harvard wouldn't have much trouble justifying that.

So what's the problem? Here are three guesses:

1) Ellison is a notoriously difficult man to deal with, and Harvard is having second thoughts about his role.
2) The redundancy between the Initiative for Global Health and the School of Public Health is causing internal feuding that has somehow mucked up the gift.
3) Larry Summers—who is deliberately lying low this year, trying to keep his name out of the press—has become so controversy-shy that he's erring on the side of turning down $100 million so as to avoid more headlines.

Perhaps some readers might have more informed thoughts?

A group of kids riding in a Hummer on Halloween blinded a boy by hitting him in the eye with a hard-boiled egg.

What does this have to do with SUVs? The mentality used to market them and the mentality of throwing eggs at people are not so different. Both are marked by selfishness, a lack of consideration, disregard for community, contempt for the environment, and a false sense of toughness. Riding in a Hummer is like riding in a tank. What do you do in a tank? You shoot stuff at people. What do teenagers do in a Hummer? They throw stuff....

Do you ever feel that, because the war in Iraq was premised on lies and deception, that it is turning us into bad people? That the essential dishonesty of the war is corroding our national morality like a flesh-eating virus?

More and more, I do....especially when reading that the CIA has been secretly holding, interrogating, and torturing alleged al Qaeda captives at secret facilities in Eastern Europe and around the world.

Dana Priest's scoop in the Washington Post is a blockbuster. (The second straight day in which the Post has kicked the Times' ass.)

Here's a crucial graf—and remember, as you read it, that in theory we still live in a democracy:

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

God knows what has been going on in these places.

President Bush has said again and again that we are fighting the terrorists "over there" so we don't have to fight them here. And yet, his policies are turning Americans into something that is not quite a terrorist—not yet—but is something like a tyrant. Somewhere, Osama bin Laden is laughing.

Secret prisons? No Congressional oversight? "Waterboarding"? Prisoners held in steel cargo containers dying of asphyxiation? What country do we live in?

Here's another crucial graf: The black-site program was approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers and officials, according to several former and current U.S. government and intelligence officials.

These people need to explain themselves. They have betrayed this country.

An anonymous donor has given the Yale School of Music a gift of $100 million.

(No, it wasn't me, but thank you for asking.)

The money will be used to pay the students' annual tuition of $23, 750. All of the students' tuition.

I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more such gifts to universities. For two reasons. One, tuition is truly astronomical—over $40,000 at Yale and Harvard colleges. Two, these are wealthy universities. It's often remarked about Harvard that the university could easily afford to pay the tuition of its undergraduates. I think this is a bit of a disingenuous argument—Harvard could afford to pay for lots of things, but that doesn't mean it should—but it does have rhetorical power, and its ubiquitousness would suggest that it has widespread appeal.

Meanwhile, good for the donor to the music school. Any thoughts on who has $100 million to spare and really loves music?

...on the Huffington Post.

At least, I think it was funny. If you need a smile, you can be the judge.

Vice-president Dick Cheney has always seemed to regard democracy with a bemused contempt. From the very first days of the Bush administration, his preference for secrecy has been made manifest: he'd be darned if anyone would ever find out who was giving him all that advice on energy policy.

Cheney is sometimes so low-profile that it's almost possible to forget he exists. The ostensible rationale for this invisibility is that vice-presidents are supposed to be in the background. But the combination of a hidden vice-president and one with enormous power is unprecedented, and so that rationale doesn't really hold up.

One suspects the real reason is that Cheney likes to do things, but doesn't like having to answer for or explain them.

I mention this now because it is galling that a member of the vice-president's staff has been indicted on a matter in which Cheney is clearly involved, and all the veep can say is what a loyal public servant Scooter Libby is.

It's time for the vice-president to start talking—to the press, and to the public. Dick Cheney needs to remember that he was elected.

I've been having technical difficulties posting the last day or so. What happens is that I write a post, click the "publish" button on Blogger, and my post just...disappears.

As you can imagine, this is frustrating.

But boy, I wish you could have read the posts. Just brilliant. Really.

Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, has this smart piece on Slate about Americans' abuse of the word "literally."

As Sheidlower smartly points out, the word has come to be used as the exact opposite of its definition; in other words, people say "literally" when they mean "figuratively."

E.g., "At the end of his twenty-minute solo, the drummer literally blew up...."

Although I would pay a dollar to see that, such abuse of a perfectly good word drives me bonkers. I literally punch my face in frustration. I literally stab myself in the neck with a jagged shard of glass. I literally chop my own head off with a paper cutter.

Sheidlower's advice: Don't get too hot and bothered about it. The misuse of the term dates back at least 150 years, and in fact, anything except its most, um, literal meaning (i.e., word for word) is already straying off course.

His conclusion: "The one sensible criticism that can be made about the intensive use of literally is that it can often lead to confusing or silly-sounding results. In this case, the answer is simple: Don't write silly-soundingly. Some usage books even bother to make this point about literally. Then again, most usage advice could be reduced to one simple instruction: "Be clear." But that would be the end of a publishing category."

Lovely phrase, that "silly-soundingly," cleverly used. Something tells me the OED is in good hands.

Much to my relief, both manager Joe Torre and general manager Brian Cashman have re-signed with the Yankees. They're good at their jobs, they provide much-needed continuity, and gosh darn it, I just like 'em.

So imagine my surprise when I picked up the paper this morning and read that Red Sox GM Theo Epstein is leaving the Red Sox after just three years—three years in which they won their first World Series in the better part of a century.

Wow.

Epstein did a fantastic job, and he's only something like 31. Pretty remarkable.

So far, you'd have to say, the Yankees are winning the off-season. And, Sox fans, such is the price of winning—ownership whose active role can make rooting for the team an occasional challenge. We Yankee fans have learned to deal with it, and appreciate the good things that George Steinbrenner does. You will, too, in time. But let's hear no more of that Evil Empire stuff, okay?

I keep thinking about Ruth La Ferla's argument that Goth has returned, an argument based in part on this paragraph:

Consumers too are following fashion and embracing a Gothic style. They are snapping up trinkets that they would once have dismissed as perverse or subversive: silver skull cuff links, chains interlaced with black ribbon in the manner of Victorian mourning jewelry, stuffed peacocks with Swarovski crystal eyes, and, as party favors, tiny rat and chicken skeletons, recent sellouts at Barneys New York. Such fondness for Goth-tinged playthings attests to the mainstreaming of a trend that was once the exclusive domain of societal outcasts and freaks.

And what I keep thinking is what a load of crap this is.

Let's consider. If the sentence, "Consumers are snapping up tiny rat and chicken skeletons as party favors...." had appeared anywhere but the New York Times, would we not be laughing hysterically upon reading it?

Ms. La Ferla has made the classic New York style-writer mistake of using the term "consumers," by which most journalists mean "Americans," to mean "a handful of New Yorkers living in zip code 10021 with way too much money and an overweening desire to spend it on themselves."

But then, since La Ferla does not produce a single shred of evidence of this fact—doesn't bother to quote a single "consumer" about his or her love for all things Goth—how are we really to know?

I think what bothers me most about this piece is, well, two things. First, it shows all the hallmarks of bad "trend" journalism—no solid proof of anything, and a cobbling together of apparently unrelated things (e.g., the publication of Elizabeth Kostova's vampire novel, "The Historian," which was ten years in the works) to posit the existence of a mass phenomenon.

But more than that, what bothers me is the idea that something is a trend merely because top-down marketers such as fashion designers and Simon Doohan of Barneys say it is.

Goth is not just about wearing black. It's a cerebral, anti-materialistic philosophy based largely on alienation from mainstream capitalism and an existential gloom about the future of the individual. So whatever they're selling at Barneys, by definition, it can't be Goth.

Oh, and by the way—here's another Tim Burton Goth creation: Winona Ryder's anti-social misfit from 1988's Beetlejuice:

The Washington Post reports that President Bush will today nominate Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, following the failed nomination of Harriet Miers.

(Who? Already she fades....)

Alito is apparently nicknamed "Scalito" for his philosophical resemblance to conservative justice Anton Scalia.

His most controversial case is sure to be his opinion in the famous 1991 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which a Third Circuit panel ruled on the legality of a Pennsylvania law imposing numerous restrictions on abortion, mandating, for example, that doctors warn women of the dangers of abortion and abide by a 24-hour waiting period.

The law in question also mandated that women seeking an abortion must notify their husbands—a stipulation Alito thought legal.

As the Post puts it, Citing previous opinions of O'Connor, Alito wrote that an abortion regulation is unconstitutional only if it imposes an undue burden on a woman's access to the procedure. The spousal notification provision, he wrote, does not constitute such a burden and must therefore only meet the requirement that it be rationally related to some legitimate government purpose.

This is a tough one. If I were married and my pregnant wife got an abortion without telling me, I'd be pretty pissed. (Though I'm not sure why marriage would be the test here. If the principle involves notifying the father, who cares whether the prospective parents are married or not?)

On the other hand, I'm skeptical that marriage gives one spouse the right to veto another spouse's physical decision. What if, for example, a woman was married to an abusive husband? How, exactly, would she notify him that she wanted to terminate her pregnancy?

The Supreme Court eventually heard the case and disagreed with Alito. Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that "spousal notification requirement is . . . likely to prevent a significant number of women from obtaining an abortion,"

My prediction: There's going to be a big, ugly fight over this pick. Washington must be a grim place right now.
_________________________________________________________________

P.S. For you media-watchers, this constitutes a big scoop for the Post. The Times is embarrassingly reduced to running this AP story on its website. Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick has an already-late piece about the looming fight over potential nominees, including Alito.

P.P.S. The Times has replaced its wire story with this one by David Kirkpatrick and Christine Hauser. Whoops! Score one for the Washington Post.

Because this week, both Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times hail its return.

"On the runways and on screen, it's once more into the creep," EW says, which is the kind of pun that would make any self-respecting Goth turn even whiter.

(Sorry, no link—have you tried to search the EW website? Don't.)

"Embrace the Darkness," the Times chimes in, in a piece that tries to correlate the return of Goth with the macabre mood of our current culture.

Both articles point to Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and various runway fashions as examples.

(Never mind that Tim Burton has never been anything but Goth: Hello, Sleepy Hollow? Edward Scissorhands? That was 1990, people.)



The Times article, as most such trend pieces are, is inadvertently hilarious.

Ruth LaFerla writes, Consumers too are following fashion and embracing a Gothic style. They are snapping up trinkets that they would once have dismissed as perverse or subversive: silver skull cuff links, chains interlaced with black ribbon in the manner of Victorian mourning jewelry, stuffed peacocks with Swarovski crystal eyes, and, as party favors, tiny rat and chicken skeletons, recent sellouts at Barneys New York.

Such fondness for Goth-tinged playthings attests to the mainstreaming of a trend that was once the exclusive domain of societal outcasts and freaks. These days Goth is "an Upper East Side way of being edgy without actually drinking anybody's blood," said Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys. With a wink he added, "Who doesn't like a vaseful of ostrich feathers at the end of the day?"

Yup. I know a lot of people who are snapping up stuffed peacocks with Swarovski crystal eyes. Whatever that has to do with Goth.

Few things are more annoying than having a perfectly good alternative lifestyle coopted by the Upper East Side. Perhaps people who whistle, or pay by check. But that's about it.

Anyway, I'm skeptical. Goth has never really gone away since the 1980s—what a decade—it's just been somewhat harder to find. What's probably at work here is a Manhattan PR-ista representing a client—probably in the fashion business, perhaps Barney's—who's been peddling a "return of Goth" story timed for Halloween.

Meanwhile, both EW and the Times seem oblivious to the ongoing Goth presence in pop music. Depeche Mode's excellent new record, Playing the Angel, for example, debuted at #7 on the Billboard charts this week, #1 at iTunes. First song: "A Pain That I'm Used To." Followed by titles like "Suffer Well," "The Sinner in Me," "Damaged People," and "The Darkest Star."

Sings David Gahan, "I'm still recovering/Still getting over all the suffering..."

Now, that's Goth....

(David Gahan, of course, being DM's lead singer, the man whose veins have more holes than a shower head. Dave, we're glad you made it!)

Anyway, Happy Halloween, everyone! Feel free to cloak yourself in black, put a ton of hairspray in your hair, and spread oodles of white pancake make-up on your face. Goth has always been about rebellion, rejection of the mainstream, and maybe it's true that we need this now more than ever....because this country's in rough shape right now. And, as the Times has pointed out, we still have 39 more George Bush-months to go.

Here's the full photo:

Just curious why this hasn't been more widespread...

The Washington Post runs this photo on its website with a vague caption; I can't find the photo elsewhere.

Perhaps others have seen this picture, but all I've seen—again and again—is that annoying Vanity Fair photo in which Plame/Wilson, seated next to her husband, Joe Wilson, in a convertible, hides her identity with a scarf and dark glasses.

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