A PUFF OF SMOKE FROM THE HOT STOVE, AND OTHER MATTERS

Now that I am committed to what will be a lengthy and time-consuming tutorial on Afro-American Studies, I find myself less engaged in the day-to-day snarking that is, after all, the raison d'etre of blogging. Still and all, certain ephemera must be noted before they evaporate. Michele Bachmann has launched her presidential bid, to great acclaim, and is already committing faux pas, or perhaps I should say faux mots. Christian charity [of which I think I have more than she, actually] compels me to cut her some slack over her confusion of John Wayne with a serial killer. I mean, anyone who has spent some serious time with John Wayne's movies could easily confuse him with a serial killer, no? And who among us can actually remember that the Lexington and Concord of Revolutionary Era fame are in Massachusetts, and not, as Bachmann apparently thinks, in New Hampshire? [There is a Concord, New Hampshire, after all, and from the perspective of the Great Plains, they must all look pretty much the same.]

Devotees of the Hot Stove League will recall that I predicted the race would come down to Romney versus Bachmann. My secret dream is that they arrive at the convention more or less in a dead heat, and that Bachmann gets passed over by the relatively sober wing of the party because polls show her being creamed by Obama, whereupon she and her fanatic supporters bolt the convention and form an insurgent party of what the Roman Catholic Church, in a different context, calls the "invincibly ignorant." [If I am not mistaken, a Catholic prelate, in an effort to assuage Mrs. Whitehead's anxiety over her husband's agnosticism, used this phrase to describe Alfred North Whitehead. I have always been charmed by the notion of Whitehead as invincibly ignorant.]

Meanwhile, Rod Blagojevich has been found guilty, keeping alive a long Illinois tradition of sending former governors to jail, and the Navy Seals who offed Bin Laden found documentary evidence that he was considering changing his organization's name in an effort to improve its image. I confess I was somewhat depressed by that news. Brooding in his gated compound, Bin Laden seems to have appropriated the least attractive features of American popular culture. On the other hand, when your worst nightmare becomes a laughing stock, there is reason to hope.

And now, back to serious work, on Part Three of my tutorial.