"Let me give you a quote that he said just four years ago: ‘If you don’t have any fresh ideas, use stale tactics to scare people'..."

"... If you don’t have a record to run on, paint your opponent as someone people should run from. Make a big election about small things... That’s what Barack Obama said when he was running for president in 2008. That’s exactly what Barack Obama has become now that he is president in 2012, and we’re going to change it."

Said Paul Ryan, last night, in Daytona Beach, Florida. I think that's a bit unfair. What about Big Bird? Big Bird isn't little. It goes without saying: Big Bird is big.

Hey, remember that great old Neil Young song about Big Bird?

Blue, blue windows behind the stars, yellow moon on the rise
Big Bird flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes
Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless

The chains are locked and tied across the door... put y'all back in chains....

"Monday morning, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up..."

"It's time to go... time to go to work."

Neil Young's hybrid car emits some serious carbon.

It bursts into flames and destroys a million dollars worth of his memorabilia.

This is like that story about the reusable shopping bags that turn out to contain lead. You try so hard to do what's right and that's the very thing that takes you into the wrong.

"On the right, hateful words are fired like bullets. I still ride a bike."

Richard Cohen* still rides a bike, but his mind is going. I mean, he's riding his bike, listening to a folk rock channel he created on Pandora on his iPhone, and for some reason, instead of throwing new stuff at him, which I think is the point of Pandora, it keeps playing the old Neil Young song "Ohio."

Cohen plunges into his 40-year-old memories about how awful it was when the National Guard shot and killed 4 college students who were protesting the Vietnam War. And naturally, in Cohen's bike-drained, folk-music befuddled brain, that leads to what's wrong with... Glenn Beck!

Why don't you see? Back in 1970, the Governor of Ohio said the protesters were "worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent." Cohen weaves his literary magic for us dogged old WaPo readers:

That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals...

... fetishizes about liberals... To "fetishize" is to make a fetish of. How do you make a fetish of about something? Cohen's rugged bike path is studded with incomprehensible prepositions.

... and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage...

What language? You didn't even quote anything from Beck. Maybe you created a Pandora channel for Beck and you listen and ideate furiously while cycling, but I don't know what you're talking about. I don't pay much attention to the pudgy chattering TV pundit, but he doesn't seem to be raging. I have seen him crying. And oddly, in Cohen's first paragraph, he portrays himself struggling (while biking) to "repress a tear" when Neil sings "Ohio." Oh, compassion! It either builds credibility or it doesn't. (Depending on whether you're liberal or conservative.)

... that fuels too much of the Tea Party...

I'm supposed to have the right image of the Tea Party so I can just swallow that assertion whole. But I've been to Tea Party rallies — and heard about them from my husband — and the people seemed pretty nice and normal. To me, Cohen's attempt to smear ordinary people is what's ugly.

Cohen rants some more about how awful everything on the right sounds to his folk-music plugged old ears. He concludes:

I hear the song more clearly now than I ever did. It is a distant sound from our not-so-distant past, but a clear warning about our future. Four dead in Ohio. Not just a song. A lesson.

Pedal on, aging columnist. Let the stream of consciousness wash down. Flow river flow. Wherever that river goes, that's where Richard Cohen wants to be.

_____________

*That's WaPo columnist Richard Cohen, or as we call him around here: the never-slept-with-Althouse Richard Cohen.

ADDED: Michael C. Moynihan:

And no, Richard Cohen doesn’t catch the irony: The dissent of Kent State protesters, he thinks, was met with deadly force because of rhetoric that “otherized them,” that turned them into a domestic enemy. Pretty much exactly what Richard Cohen is doing to the dissidents of the Tea Party movement.

"After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, and innumerable histrionics, this Court is left to conclude that with this lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'"

And so the federal district judge would shut the drawer on the 1996 scandal known as Filegate.

While this Court seriously entertained the plaintiffs' allegations that their privacy had been violated  — and indeed it was, even if not in the sense contemplated by the Privacy Act — after ample opportunity, they have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode — about which they do have cause to complain — was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu.

By the way the there that wasn't there for Gertrude Stein was Oakland, California, which really does exist. She just didn't think much of it. I'm not sure what that says about Filegate.

Ever since Gertrude Stein wrote that there was “no there there” during a return trip to her childhood home in Oakland, California, her words have been distorted to imply that Oakland was a “nowhere,” a dissing along the lines of Neil Young’s “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere,” which was funny for Young, a transplanted Canadian singer, to write for an U.S. pop market, because Young had really been a Californian before he transplanted himself to California, as Stein had been really been an American in Paris long before she left the U.S., and returning to her “there is no there there,” she later clarified that the Oakland of her childhood was gone, she was commenting on her great theme, not just hers, of course, a great thread in American literature concerning place and memory, we all lose the place of our childhood, and in adulthood clutch that place, or more accurately, a complex tangled image of that place, close to our bosom, as Cather did with her....

Hey, wait a minute. I see what he's doing there. That sentence goes on for 1,316 words more. Essay dismissed.

Ooh, I'm going to lie down here!

Meade takes a photo, after invoking what Neil Young song?

"I'm looking around, and I realize, this guy having a tuque on has really great boots on, these sort of cowboy, motorcycle boots..."

"And he was wearing really nice leather pants. And I realize I'm staring face-to-face with Bob Dylan," says John Kiernan, the owner of the house that Neil Young grew up in. Dylan was in town -- Winnipeg -- for a concert. Imagine looking out your window, and there is Bob Dylan. You could tell by the high quality of the leather that it's not just anybody. Kiernan brought the superhuman musician inside for a house tour.

"OK, so this was his view, and this was where he listened to his music,"recalls Tiernan. "It suddenly dawned on me, when you're looking at Bob Dylan standing in a hallway, that he had a very parallel experience 200 miles to the south, sitting in his room, listening to his music, looking out his window."

Dylan grew up Hibbing, MN, about 500 km from Winnipeg, so he saw it as a parallel experience.

Oh, the great superhuman musicians of the north!

When I was a young boy,
My mama said to me
Your daddy's leavin' home today,
I think he's gone to stay.
We packed up all our bags
And drove out to Winnipeg.
When we got to Winnipeg
I checked in to school.
I wore white bucks on my feet,
When I learned the golden rule.
The punches came fast and hard
Lying on my back
in the school yard.

Don't be denied, don't be denied.
Don't be denied, don't be denied.
Don't be denied, don't be denied.

Things said and unsaid in a record store.

Me: "I love your T-shirt. I've had that record since the 60s. Love the artwork."

Record Store Guy: My friend made it for me. I don't know where she got the picture.

Me: She probably downloaded it from the internet.

Unsaid thing: And yet here I am, buying a CD box set from you, when other people are downloading their music from the internet.

Thing I just realized: I could have save $10 buying it on Amazon.

Explain: The continued existence of record stores.

About all that hair.

We all know by now that Christopher Hitchens got a "back, sack and crack wax."

So let's move on to a general contemplation of humanity and its body hair:

It is hard in the West to recall that there was a brief moment when the ladygarden was left untended, and the female body celebrated and desired in its natural state. The actress Sienna Miller is now filming Hippy Hippy Shake, a movie about the Oz magazine trial, and photos have circulated of her naked, except for obligatory flowers in her hair. And yet for all the effortful re-creation of the Sixties, one glaring anachronism remains: the Hitler moustache of a Brazilian wax, which marks Miller out as a totally 21st-century girl. Perhaps Hair and Make-up couldn't manage a merkin.

Oh, yeah, I remember those hippies. Remember:

Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy

What was the "there" there, if not... "the ladygarden"? It says everywhere. Could it be any plainer?

Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen

"Waxen" didn't mean you should be waxing your hair off. It meant it was fine for it to be waxy.

Here's the video for the song. You know, I remember when they were filming "Hair" in Central Park, and the call went out for people with a lot of hair to come out and be extras. I considered going — I looked like this around that time — but I was too busy or too aloof or — oh, who knows what I was thinking about in the mid-70s.

Back to the main article:

But then around the mid-90s some mysterious memo went out to twentysomething women that it was no longer sufficient to tidy the “bikini line” so it didn't cascade down the inner thigh like a spider plant.

Oh, yeah, before the mid-90s, you could wear a bikini and reveal pubic hair growing all down your legs! [CORRECTION: Ha, ha. I misread that.]

Let's get the history straight. The bikini hair that caused a stir in the mid-90s was brimming over the top like this — on the cover of The Black Crowes album "Amorica." Even The Black Crowes didn't go for the down to there hair — and neither did anyone in the 70s. Not in a bathing suit anyway.

(Hmmm.... maybe you could in Britain.)

The gyms of Britain were suddenly full of women waxed into weeny welcome mats, with all the stubble, bruises, pimpled hair follicles and burst blood vessels that accompany this excruciating sexifying of the sex.

Like a trend for comedy-size breast implants, inflatable lips, hair extensions, extreme nails and high street daywear revealing more tittage than a ten-quid hooker, waxing filtered down from the porn industry. Here defuzzing makes the action, as it were, easier to follow. And for male performers depilation adds the illusion of an extra inch. Maybe Hitchens had that in mind.

Now, I'm thinking of this banned album cover. (More banned album covers here.)

And don't you love Wikipedia? Check out the luxuriantly detailed article "Merkin." President Merkin Muffley — the (bald) President of the United States in "Dr. Strangelove" — came easily to mind for me. But there's so much more:

The narrator, Humbert Humbert, in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), recalls, "Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl."

Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, says, "He wears a false cunt and merkin of sable both handcrafted...by the notorious Mme. Ophir."...

The 1969 film Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? written by and starring Anthony Newley, is a veritable cornucopia of dirty-joke names. In addition to the two in the title, there's a character (played by Joan Collins), named Polyester Poontang.

Pearl Jam and Neil Young released a two-song companion to Mirror Ball called Merkin Ball....

In an episode of Family Guy, an advertising agent offers Joe Swanson a car, his pants and a merkin so that he will sign up for an advertising contract....

On the 1967 Chess LP The Baroques by the Milwaukee band of the same name, the word "merkin" is heard in the song "Bicycle." The lyric is "...I'll take back the merkin I gave you for Christmas, and you'll be sorry when the wind gets cold, 'cause it'll be hanging from the aerial of my bicycle...."

Lots more at the link.

Two concert venues: The Fillmore East and Las Vegas.

I see Prince has set up his act in a permanent spot in Las Vegas. I approve! He doesn't have to come to us. We'll make our pilgrimmage to him. And it will justify that trip to Las Vegas that might otherwise seem too ridiculous but which is actually pretty fun.

And Neil Young is putting out the album "Live at the Fillmore East: March 6 & 7, 1970."

[His band, Crazy Horse,] featured the guitarist Danny Whitten, who died in 1972; the drummer Ralph Molina; the bassist Billy Talbot; and Jack Nitzsche on electric piano. The rhythm section (except for Mr. Nitzsche) had only basic skills. The band was constructed for open-ended songs with a boom-boom-prap beat at a slouchy medium tempo — does any popular rock band play this slowly anymore? — and acres of Mr. Young’s soloing. (He had just found his true sound through a combination of the right guitar and the right amplifier, his tremolo bar imitating his trembly voice, the low-end roar counterbalancing that vulnerability.) But despite the slobby phrasing, the obdurate needling quality of Mr. Young’s straight eighth notes and the weird effect of a casual delivery at high volume, this music has a serene and direct purpose.

More than half the tracks are concise tunes, less than four minutes, including “Winterlong,” “Wonderin’ ” and “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown.” But they’re just palate cleansers. The real action is in the long songs — a 12-minute “Down By the River,” in particular, and a 14-minute “Cowgirl in the Sand” — in which the band works within the dimensions of its gigantic, rolling, spacious sound. The record is a blast, but it’s also possibly the first stage in an entirely new way of understanding what Neil Young has done with his life.

Slobby phrasing, the obdurate needling quality... I love that! And please indulge this aging Baby Boomer's gloat: I was there!

Audible Althouse #47.

I'm feeling at cross-purposes with the other lawprofs at the lawproffy "Bloggership" conference at Harvard, and I'm thinking about Neil Young and what he meant to me when I was young. I'm home from Boston, sitting in my big room, and there are big birds flying across the sky. It's a very podcasty podcast that touches on the blogginess of blogging.

Here's the podcast. Live stream here.

Catching up on the NYT/taking a hot bath.

I want to read the three newspapers that came while I was away, but I don't want to spend all evening on the task. I've got a podcast to record, and "The Sopranos" and "Big Love" are on tonight. I'm also freezing on this damp, blustery day, in which I had to run around in the wind and rain twice -- once to get to an airplane. The solution is to run a hot bath and page through all the newspapers in the 15 minutes it takes to fill the tub. I'll speed-choose pieces to blog and set them aside to blog once I've soaked myself back to a normal temperature.

***

1. "Neil Young Is Angry About War and Wants Everyone to Know It" (on line title: "Neil Young's 'Living With War' Shows He Doesn't Like It") by Jon Pareles:

The songs on "Living With War" are straightforward and single-minded, setting aside the allusive, enigmatic quality of Mr. Young's rock classics. "These are all ideas we've heard before," he said. "There's nothing new in there. I just connected the dots."...

"We are the silent majority now, and we haven't done a damn thing," Mr. Young said. "We've stood by and watched this happen. But there's more of us than there is of them, and we have to do something. When people start talking and see they can get away with it, it's going to happen everywhere. It's going to be a landslide, it's going to be a tidal wave. This is just the tip of it."

The tip of the landslide... the tip of the tidal wave... damn... if only I could think of another metaphor...

Those "allusive, enigmatic" lyrics of long ago are far out of reach.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars/Yellow moon on the rise/Big birds flying across the sky/Throwing shadows on our eyes....

Oh, Neil... There are politics and there is art. I'll always love the Neil Young of the distant past.

The chains are locked and tied across the door/Baby, sing with me somehow...

2. "New York City as Film Set: From Mean Streets to Clean Streets," by John Clark:

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, said: "There's been a sea change. I can remember well into the 70's films where there is the terrific sense of New York as being this adventurous place. Certainly if you go back to the 30's and think of a film like 'My Man Godfrey,' New York is a great, dangerous playground. Those films really had a sense of how jazzy and exciting it was to be in New York. I can't think of the last film I've seen that had that feeling."

Paul Mazursky, the Brooklyn-born director of New York films like "Next Stop, Greenwich Village" (1976) and "An Unmarried Woman" (1978), echoed this view: "I'm trying to think of the last good New York movie." (He's still thinking.)

How ironic that the gentrifiers make the city too beautiful to serve as the backdrop for the art they love, when they love art because it is beautiful.

He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Beneath his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be...

3. "An Adjective for Cakes, but Not for Bill Gates," by Geoffrey Nunberg. I want to blog about this based on the title alone, and I have no idea what the article is about. Oh, it's about the word "rich." Ha, ha:

Asked in 2003 if he felt rich, Bill Gates would say only, "At this point I'm clearly not by some definition middle class."

Unlike "prosperous" or "affluent," "rich" implies a society divided into separate estates, a legacy of the word's origin in the Indo-European name for a tribal king.

People may disagree on exactly how much money it takes to be rich, but that only confirms that it's an absolute threshold, and that those who have crossed it are delivered from the cares that afflict the rest of us. (Nobody who wins the lottery cries "I'm affluent!")

One of my sons, when he was little, used to often ask me, "Are we rich?" There's a feeling we have about what it would be like to be rich. And it always seems as though we'd have to make at least twice as much as we do to have that feeling. Later, if you make that much money, you'll think you need twice that to feel rich. But if you look at yourself from the perspective of the vast majority of people in the world, shouldn't you be ashamed to say you're not rich? So how do you answer the child who asks "Are we rich?"

4. "Films of Infamy," by David Thomson.

... I can imagine a film other than "Munich" or "United 93," a greater film, a film about different kinds of courage. In this film, the courage of the passengers would be shown and honored, but there would be an equal effort to show the courage of the terrorists (without calling them simply "evil" or "insane")....

The really difficult film to make or offer in America will be the one that says no, the world did not alter its nature on 9/11, even if the worst politicians used that event to switch their reality. But on 9/11, we faced the first need to ask ourselves how other people — evil, alien, insane — could be so brave. The history of terrorism — and it includes the independence of this country — is that in the end you have to understand the grievance of the aggrieved, whether you agree with it or not. That film has still to come.

Well, films have shown the perspective of criminals and villains quite often. These characters, if the film is any good, have their motivations, grievances, and, of course, they are bold and daring enough to carry out their evil actions. But how can you think anyone should make such a movie about the enemy before the war is over? Filmmakers aren't cowards for declining to make a show of their own courage like that.

5. "Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York," Nikolai Ouroussoff.

The threats facing the contemporary city are not what they were when she first formed her ideas, now nearly 50 years ago. The activists of Ms. Jacobs's generation may have saved SoHo from Mr. Moses' bulldozers, but they could not stop it from becoming an open-air mall.

The old buildings are still there, the streets are once again paved in cobblestone, but the rich mix of manufacturers, artists and gallery owners has been replaced by homogenous crowds of lemming-like shoppers. Nothing is produced there any more. It is a corner of the city that is nearly as soulless, in its way, as the superblocks that Ms. Jacobs so reviled....

The lesson we should take from Ms. Jacobs was her ability to look at the city with her eyes wide open, without rigid prejudices. Maybe we should see where that lesson leads next.

Jacobs as a method, not a conclusion. Subtly and modestly stated.

***

Now it's time to do a podcast and then settle in for a strong dose of television. I have not watched enough TV in the last four days. It's time.

Sex Pistols, Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Miles Davis, Blondie.

The new inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Do you approve?

Note that Black Sabbath and Lynyrd Skynyrd got rejected the first seven times they were eligible, and the Sex Pistols got rejected four times.

"It's about time," Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward told Reuters, adding that he had long ago given up on getting inducted.

"What bothered me was not necessarily that Black Sabbath was being passed over but that hard rock and heavy metal was being passed over ... Bands that created heavy metal music or brought it into the foreground ought to have gone into the hall of fame some time ago, quite honestly."

The injustice!

Related post: I visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

AFTERTHOUGHT: I'll bet Lynyrd Skynyrd was helped by the very nice presentation they were given on "American Idol" this past season -- backing Bo Bice.

IN THE COMMENTS: There's some questioning of why Miles Davis belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. All I can say is: I saw him open for Neil Young & Crazy Horse at the Fillmore East in 1970.

In which Althouse has a psychedelic flashback. I don't know about you, but sometimes I've tried to remember, what were the shows I saw at the Fillmore East? I remembered some of the bands, but who really were the others? So I was thrilled to find this site, which is trying to list every act and every show.

So who played with The Mothers of Invention in 1969? The date was Feb. 21/22, and the opening acts were Chicago and The Buddy Miles Express. And I went to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse one night in 1970 and the opening acts were The Steve Miller Band and Miles Davis! When did I see The New Riders of the Purple Sage play with The Grateful Dead? 1970? 1971? I can't tell from this, because there are several such shows. When I saw them there was a third act, which played in the middle, that was just Pig Pen and Jerry Garcia on acoustic guitars. It must have been May 15, 1970, because I remember hearing them make a big deal about the upcoming concert with Crosby, Stills & Nash, which caused us to scoff and shake our heads in dismay. Rock and Roll was over and people like them were destroying it! Or was it this night, when "Phil places two bass notes that are just perfect."

Remember when people were all excited about Delaney & Bonnie? And who were Mason & Elliot that they were headliners? (Oh.) Remember when people were crazy for Ten Years After? Remember The Hello People (they played at my high school once)("It's a Monday Kind of Tuesday"... or was it Wednesday?). Remember Elephant Memory? Or am I mixing them up with Crazy Elephants? And who were Cactus? How could they have topped Edgar Winter and Humble Pie some night in 1971? And there's Elton John, late of American Idol, already headlining in 1971 (with Wishbone Ash and Sea Train).

And there's T. Rex in 1971--was it already T. Rex or was it still Tyrannosaurus Rex? (We played their album Unicorn all the time in 1970.) In 1970, you could have seen The Incredible String Band (I knew people who worshipped them!) along with The Stone Monkey Mime Group (good lord! who were they?). And who were Soft White Underbelly, Grootna, and Blodwyn Pig?

Looking for some answers, I ran across Fuzz Acid & Flowers, which is an amazing compilation of info about "U.S. psych and garage music 1964 - 1972," with "band histories/musical analysis on over 5,400 US acts of the era." Great fun browsing just for the psychedelic names. We remember Strawberry Alarm Clock, but there was also Strawberry Tuesday and Strawberry Window. Was there Orange? Of course: Orange Colored Sky, The Orange Groove, and The Orange Wedge. How about "electric"--was that a popular psychedelic word? Here's the official list:

The Electrical Banana
The Electric Company
Electric Firebirds
The Electric Flag
Electric Hair
Electric Junkyard
Electric Love
Electric Piano Playground
The Electric Prunes
The Electric Screwdriver
Electric Toilet
Electric Tomorrow
Electric Train
Electrified People
The Electro Magnetic Flowerseed
The Electronic Concept Orchestra

And I love the places where the same psychedelic idea struck several groups independently:

Stix and Stoned
Stix and Stones
Stix & Stonz

Okay, enough of that. Go make your own discoveries. I've got admissions files and a law review edit and income tax forms ...

Oh, and that previous entry, which looks psychedelic next to this one--it's a Monday kind of Tuesday/It's a Thursday kind of Saturday--is just about the NYT crossword puzzle. ... In case you're inclined to worry about me! Did you finish the Saturday puzzle?