Dear West Virginians...

Through a funny twist of fate, you've been given an opportunity to play a historic role in the Democratic primary -- one it looks like you're probably going to piss away. Were you to defy all forecasts and break in favor of Barack Obama tonight, the race would be over; Hillary Clinton would have no choice but to drop out tomorrow.

Of course, that would require West Virginians to do something many of you seem loath to do: vote for a black guy, one whom an awful lot of you suspect to be a secret Muslim. But you know what? By not going for Obama, you're not going to prevent him from getting the nomination; you're just going to drag it out a couple more weeks. This is not Pennsylvania all over again; you can't put the whole contest back in play, just the timing. You can, and probably will, however, reinforce the belief that your state is a backwards, xenophobic place.

This sounds like an ultimatum: Vote for Obama or the rest of us will think you're racists. So don't think of it that way, but like this: You can't accomplish anything by voting for Clinton, but you can accomplish something by voting for the Democratic Party: You can contribute materially to its chances of victory in November by giving its candidate extra weeks to rest and campaign, and even more so by putting paid to the pernicious notion that lower-income whites won't vote for a black person with a middle-eastern name.

Of course, to do that, you have to actually be willing to vote for a black person with a middle-eastern name. But can't you bring yourself to do that when the alternative is throwing your vote away?

Two Thoughts on the 'Cling' Thing

1)It's ironic to hear Hillary Clinton painting Barack Obama as the elitist successor to John Kerry and Al Gore. Ever since this election cycle got going, I've been saying that picking Hillary would be making the same mistake three times in a row -- putting up a candidate with no charisma in a race that's all about personality.

Charisma is the X-factor in politics, and especially presidential politics. All is forgiven to he who has it. Did Kerry and Gore really come off as such terrible elitists? Or did the "elitism" label stick because we didn't like them enough to bat it away? The latter, I think. Remember, elitism wasn't even the dominant meme in either of those contests. With Gore, it was dishonesty (I know, it seems hard to believe at this remove), and with Kerry it was flip-flopping. In each case, anything the Republicans threw at him stuck. Obama has already shown he has the kind of charisma that turns attacks into sympathy.

2)Commentators from Mickey Kaus to Paul Krugman have tried to show how Obama's speech about how "bitter" small-town voters "cling" to God, guns and xenophobia was logically incoherent. And maybe it was, as formulated, but there was a powerful thread somewhere in there about how bad leaders use hot-button issues to distract an angry populace. Think of the Middle East by way of analogy. No one thinks repression in Iran and Egypt is responsible for pro-Palestinian sentiment; but leaders in both countries successfully channel their citizens' anger into hatred of Israel, convincing them to focus on the Zionist threat instead of the regime holding them down. So it is with abortion, gay marriage, gun control, etc. in small-town America. They help leaders with otherwise losing policies maintain a grip on power.

Well, I do support his not-being-Hillary platform...

Like, I suspect, many Democrats, I am feeling enormous ambivalence this week over the buzz surrounding Al Gore's possible 2008 presidential bid. On one hand, I welcome anyone who can steal the nomination from Hillary Clinton -- not because I would mind seeing her in the White House, but because I think she would get annihilated in the general election. There are just too many people who would consider voting for a Democrat but not for her.

More to the point, I think Gore has the makings of a very good president. If he were to accomplish even half his agenda on global warming, we might even someday consider him one of our great presidents.

But, oy, the campaign. Is there any reason -- other than extreme wishful thinking -- to conclude that Gore would run a less cringe-making campaign this time around? Yes, as John Heilemann points out, Gore is engaging in person -- but we've known that for years. Okay, so maybe he has an appealing fuck-all attitude now. Wouldn't it evaporate the day he declares, opening the way for more painful, trying-too-hard gaffes like the convention kiss?

For awhile now, I've been telling anyone who will listen that what the Dems need more than anything in 2008 is to learn the lesson of the last four elections and offer voters the guy with more charisma. I'm not prepared to say that Gore isn't that guy, but it's going to take a hell of a lot of convincing.

More like "Six Feet Blunder." Pow!

Finally caught the series finale of "Six Feet Under" last weekend. First off, let me say a hearty fuck you very much to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and everybody else who printed warning-less spoilers. Can we all agree, from this point on, to assume a significant proportion of any cult show's viewership is going to be watching it on DVD well after its initial airing?

That said: Spoiler alert.

The last scene is a long montage which invites us to envision the deaths of the show's main characters, possibly through Claire's imagination. There's nothing I could say about the sequence's emotional resonance that hasn't been said already, so instead I'll quibble. Several of the characters just keel over -- Brenda in a nursing home, David watching a touch football game, Rico on a cruise ship. Now, I happen to be married to a doctor, who tells me a lot more about her work than I'd sometimes care to know, and one thing I know is that when people just keel over, it's almost always one of three things: a myocardial infarction (loosely speaking, a heart attack), a pulmonary embolism, or a stroke. And while these things can, indeed, strike at any time, by far the most common time is while one is on the toilet. It has to do with the act of bearing town, which raises the pressure in the thoracic cavity. So my reaction was: great ending, but where are the bathroom deaths? And C., who was watching it with me, told me afterwards that she'd been thinking the same thing.

Teenage suicide = comic gold!

Just noticed something incredibly strange in this week's New Yorker (April 3, 2006 issue). The Shouts & Murmurs humor piece, by Paul Rudnick, seems to have been quite obviously inspired by "Prairie Fire," an earlier New Yorker feature by Eric Konigsberg on the March 2005 suicide of Brandenn Bremmer, a 14-year old prodigy from Nebraska. It's all there: the deluded parents, the self-serving "expert," the New Agey lingo (indigo child = dandelion child), the obnoxious condescension towards other kids.

Now, if you read my earlier post on "Prairie Fire," you'll know I think Brandenn's parents and especially his psychologist deserve some criticism for the way they isolated him from other kids and used him as the medium for their own ego gratification. But a humor piece? In the same publication, two months later? Pretty strange. I'd be interested to know if I'm right about that story being Paul Rudnick's inspiration. Heck, maybe I'll ask him.

Caitlin Flanagan: So easy to hate on, so (inexplicably) hard to understand.

Wow. I've read just about every single thing Caitlin Flanagan has published. I've also read most of what's been written about her, and quizzed her in person at some length about her views. So why is it the Caitlin Flanagan her liberal critics describe is almost completely unrecognizable to me?

Here is what Flanagan has to say, as I understand it: It's all but impossible to be a full-time mother and have a full-time career. The same is true for dads. The difference is, whether by nature or culture, women are more particular about their children's upbringing, and they feel more keenly the separation from their kids having a full-time job necessitates.

Here's what liberal feminists (a group I usually have no quarrel with) hear: Women are meant to be mothers. Kids whose primary caregiver is someone other than their mother suffer emotional harm.

Those are disagreeable sentiments, to be sure. But guess what? Flanagan never makes anything like those claims. Her focus is almost exclusively on what the working vs. staying home conflict means for the mothers. What she does say is that a woman who spends virtually all of her waking time with her children typically has a stronger bond with them than the woman who spends three or four hours a day with them. (Again, I'm certain she'd say the same about men.) This is where her beef with feminists comes in. To feminists, it's heresy to say that working women might be sacrificing the intensity of the mother-child bond. They've been saying this for so long, an entire generation of women has grown up expecting it to be true -- only to find themselves confused and grieved at the separation anxiety they feel upon handing their kids off to nannies or daycare. I suppose feminists would argue that such anxiety is nothing but culturally-imposed guilt. But do they really believe that themselves? If they did, I suspect their attacks on Flanagan would contain far less vitriol.

Deep thoughts on an increasingly shallow subject.

Don't laugh, but I used to love GQ. I started reading it my senior year in college, when I bought a couple issues in the erroneous belief that I would need some sort of grownup wardrobe to enter the working world. The writing quickly hooked me, particularly everything by Andrew Corsello, whom I consider to be the best magazine writer working. I read those issues cover to cover, devouring even the semi-ridiculous lifestyle articles about touring Tuscany by motorcycle and how to select the finest calfskin driving gloves for your motorcycle tour of Tuscany. It's probably no exaggeration to say I would not have ended up in journalism were it not for my discovering GQ.

The April issue represents all the reasons I no longer consider myself a fan of the magazine. There's still some great writing -- the piece by John Bowe on the photographer and the mail-order bride is unlike anything I've read before (read about the backstory here) -- but it's packaged with some of the most idiotic, paint-by-numbers lifestyle journalism this side of...well, those other men's magazines. I'm talking about "The Field Guide to American Women," the gay-vague fashion story on how to "reveal your appeal," and the latest installment of Cecil Donahue's absolutely moronic workplace column. (This one starts with a sub-hed saying "You will have an office affair," only for Donahue to say, in his lede, "I've never even come close to having an office affair.")

If only I could stop reading GQ altogether, but I can't. They still publish the very occasional article by Corsello, and they've got a great new writer named John Jeremiah Sullivan, who's up for a National Magazine Award this year. And Jim Nelson writes the funniest editor's notes around (although this month's is nothing to brag about). But intelligence and vapidity are like oil and water -- they don't mix. And when you pick up GQ these days, guess which one jumps out at you.