Tonight on Mad Men, Sally invents a tasty new breakfast treat: rum on French toast.

It's something of a providential accident, like the discovery that led to penicillin, and I'm going to ask Laura some fine morning to "whip me up a batch," just so I can hear which tone of voice she uses to answer, "No," followed by some variation of "Are you insane?"

It is only fortified by a hearty meal of French toast with rum that Don is able to stroll purposely past Miss Blankenship's desk and not lose his heated cool as she asks, in that melodic caw of hers, "Are you going to the toilet?"

That's a question Laura never asks, since she assumes I always am, even when I'm not.

Marriage, it's so demystifying.

The Mad Men recap will be posted tomorrow, given that so many people will be preoccupied tonight by the series premiere of HBO's Boardwalk Empire, of which my latest column has something to say.

I'm down here on the Jersey Shore, sitting on the back porch watching leaves fall singly from the trees, like lines from a Zen poem. An estimated half-million monarch butterflies are passing through the peninsula and a pair of red admirals sunned themselves this morning on the front lawn. All is tranquil, everyone hunkering down and loading up for the Eagles-Lions game, the checkout items of choice at the local Wawa being a six pack of beer and a pack of cigs--all you really need for a Sunday afternoon unless you're like me, a leaf-contemplating disinterested football fan who doesn't much care who wins, for that would lead to attachment, and it's painful enough hearing the Orioles lose on the radio to Goldman Sachs.

If all is quiet on the scenic front, one click into the blogosphere and the barbecue pit of the moronic inferno spits up flames and howlings.

A lot of liberal blogs are having a comedy festival over the loonybird utterings of Palinette Christine O'Donnell, Delaware's witchcraft-dabbling anti-wanking Tea Party majorette Senate candidate, but we may be past the point where such spectacles can be laughed off the stage.

If David Seaton is correct, highlighting the crazy, contradictory, cult-speak shit spewed by Palin and Tea Partiers is missing the point and misunderstanding the aberrant pathology that is juggernauting.

Such crazy shit isn't rabid froth or rogue electricity, it's a deliberate toxin being released into the body politic. O'Donnell may not know what she's doing beneath the ditzy soundbites, but those who have loaded the hypodermic do.

If people really understood that there wasn't going to be future abundance on its previous scale, that it was going to be like in a lifeboat, or like the buried miners in Chile, with only so much water and so much food, survivors would demand, as in a lifeboat, that the provisions be shared equitably. This would mean that people with huge fortunes would have to take an enormous haircut, as their abundance would have to be shared out... they don't like that idea one bit.

They don't want anybody else to like that idea either and that costs a lot of money to pull off.

The key phrase would be, "if people really understood". So it is important for those who own the chairs to keep the chairless from thinking, from understanding what their situation really is.

This is especially difficult for Americans to come to grips with, as America's whole culture, both the real everyday one and the Hollywood mythical one, are built around the idea of limitless horizons and unlimited opportunity. There has always been a lot of unreality in this, but it is the foundational myth and emotionally a very sustaining one, especially for Americans now going through a rough patch. It will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, for most Americans to face the new reality soon and to think clearly about its implications.

That is what the Tea Party, Fox, etc is all about: keeping people from thinking straight. The idea is to play on people's emotions: fear, hate, racism, xenophobia, just to keep them from doing the math. The Teabaggers, Beck, Gringrich and Fox are often criticized for not making any sense... this is not a failure of communication or an error on their part... that is the object of the exercise: to make rational thought difficult or impossible due to emotional overload. [my bolding] This is a slippery slope that usually leads a country that travels it into more emotions, more war and less and less cool headed thinking.

This is the world that readers in their teens and twenties are going to spend the rest of their lives trying to make habitable.

We are already there.

And by "there," Seaton means here, not an ideal place to be.

The US Open ends and the fall season of New York City Ballet begins--with free champagne!

Let this become an annual tradition.

How pleasing and inspiring it is to be able to watch two of my inspirational heroes, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Buckminster Fuller, engaging on stage in 1971, joined together in the spirit of optimism and mission in an orbital docking of East and West, ancient wisdom and modern science, Yankee know-how and Vedic holistics. The universality of their message is even more vital today, when so much of America wants to curl up in an angry fetal ball, resisting the future, denying global dynamics and evolving consciousness, reducing everything to Ayn Randian black-white oppositions, insisting on acting like the strutting top dog of the planet and civilization while throwing squalling tantrums over not getting its way. A quarter of this country thinks they deserve their own privileged cabin on Spaceship Earth, everyone else be damned or bombed into submission, and they're going to end up in the cargo section if they don't open their grizzled minds.

Such a contrast these two make: Bucky, in his professorial glasses and "second-rate bank clerk" wardrobe (his look a deliberate gambit to de-accentuate himself, as he explains here), parked behind a desk, and Maharishi, in his white robes, abundant, untamed hair, beads,
sitting cross-legged on a bouquet-flanked platform. Bucky is usually thought of as "all brain," a cosmic engineer of endless expounding, but his testimony here--about how the contemplation of suicide in 1927 pivotally turned his thought inward and then expansively outward--is quite moving and plainspoken. Those wishing to know more about Bucky and the work being conducted in his name and purpose can visit the Buckminster Fuller Institute. It'll help spiral you above and beyond election cycles and the Wagnerian white noise of media chatter.

Rain delay at the US Open, giving Djokovic rest time to rev up for his next round of racquet abuse an opportune time for you to dine on my Mad Men recap, covering an episode in which all sorts of racy things occur in the backseats of rental cars that appear strangely driverless.

At dentist's. Mad Med recap on tap upon return...

TPM's Josh Marshall pithily describes the perversity of a day of mourning being converted into a Newt Gingrich belly-dance of dread-mongering:

Having a hard time reconciling the experiences of those I know who lived through the 9/11 attacks with the emergence of "9/11" as Republican hate festival.

On the other hand, how did we not see it coming.

Upon which follows a clip of Rudy Giuliani at his most Tony Soprano neocon.

But basic, venal political opportunism doesn't begin to explain the magnitude of dementia uncapped by 9/11 that led to a lava flow of blood and destruction that veined through the decade.

In The Independent (UK), the great Robert Fisk asks at the top of his voice:

Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" - as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West.

But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived - or lives still - in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah - not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all - utterly - on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks* will be ready to take his place.

Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary - and heaven spare us next year from the 10th - 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters. They have prowled Iraq - both the Western and the local variety - and slaughtered 100,000 souls, or 500,000, or a million; and who cares? They have killed tens of thousands in Afghanistan; and who cares? And as the sickness has spread across the Middle East and then the globe, they - the air force pilots and the insurgents, the Marines and the suicide bombers, the al-Qa'idas of the Maghreb and of the Khalij and of the Caliphate of Iraq and the special forces and the close air support boys and the throat-cutters - have torn the heads off women and children and the old and the sick and the young and healthy, from the Indus to the Mediterranean, from Bali to the London Tube; quite a memorial to the 2,966 innocents who were killed nine years ago...

Yes, this anniversary has been one long desecration of the memories of the victims that day, led by Pam Geller and her other friends from the Hellmouth, including the deluded John Bolton, fool enough to flirt with a presidential run in his wet dream of becoming the white Alan Keyes.

And (as the passage from Fisk that I bolded portends) the 10th anniversary threatens to be even more of a monumental spread of maudlin bad faith, vicious scapegoating, and journalistic thumb-sucking. I'm going to make it a point of being out of the city next September 11th, wanting to be as far away from the ideological carpetbaggers as possible, though "far away" is never quite far enough.

*Here's an attention-craving crank dying to flick his Bic.

Here's an even crankier crank.

And at the very devoutly Christian "View from the Right," a pitiful gesture of prick-brained preening.

Here's where we were the other night, me and Laura and a Special Guest Star, perched in the wuthering heights of Arthur Ashe Stadium, to watch the God of Thunder, Rafael Nadal.

Being there made me almost ashamed of the sheltered life I've led, the narrow slats I've allowed myself to get stuck between. All these years I've lived in New York, all these years I've watched this event on TV, and yet this, this, was the first time (voice begins to crack) I've ever attended the U.S. Open.

And it was such a blast. We had gotten a pair of freebies from our brilliant friend, Holly Brubach, and invited a Special Guest Star along, she being a US Open virgin too. The women's match, set to start at 7 pm (Clijsters vs Stosur), began an hour late, went three sets, and the Nadal-Lopez match didn't unfold until 11; it only went three sets, but we still didn't rattle home until about 2:30 AM, not regretting a minute of lost sleep. If you've never been to the US Open, it really is one of greatest things New York has to offer, and tennis in person is like Avatar in 3-D compared to the experience of watching it on TV.

It was, as I've mentioned, breezy that night, clearly messing with the women's game and none too fun for the men's, but the wind picked up even harder on successive nights, blowing hair and backhand returns gustily astray. "I’ve avoided talking about the weather," writes Louisa Thomas at Paris Review Daily, "since you’ll have heard about the weather. Every story about the Open has discussed it; every TV commentator has obsessed over 'the conditions.' First, it was very, very hot. Then there was talk of hurricanes. Finally, came the devastating winds." She continues:

But the weather cannot be avoided. Nor should it. “We are physical beings in a physical world,” the poet Wallace Stevens once wrote to a critic. He also said, “The state of the weather soon becomes a state of mind.” The wind has turned the tennis ugly. Letting blown tosses fall, servers can’t find a rhythm. Topspin shots that should arc inside the lines fly long. Routine groundstrokes become hard to handle. Any ball that floats begins to flutter. Last night, Robin Soderling netted an overhead hit from a squat. Against the third-seeded Novak Djokovic, the Frenchman Gael Monfils became so rattled by the swirling air that he tried trick shots when regular strokes would do, swinging through his legs instead of hitting a normal forehand. “I was completely lost,” he said afterward. “Can’t serve. Can’t really use my forehand. You run for what?”

You run for what? And yet, the winners run. They adjust their angles, shorten their toss, and smile when the wind redirects a crosscourt shot down the line. Yesterday, the 7th-seeded Vera Zvonavera and the top-seeded Caroline Wozniacki hit fewer than half as many unforced errors as their opponents. While Wozniacki’s opponent, Dominika Cibulkova, smashed and slashed her racket, as if she could cut the wind, Wozniaki calmly braided her errant hair.

But no one has been immune to the wind like Roger Federer...

Whom I suspect of being Loki to Nadal's Thor, though that's obviously something I can't prove, scientifically.

If only the great Jack Kirby were alive to draw these two immortals in racquet combat!

First a drunken, heckling Duck at the Clios, insulting Jennifer Aniston's penguin dad, and now this. (h/t Dennis Perrin and John Cole @ Balloon Juice)

This is why I no longer drink before the National Magazine Awards, because in the past my pointed jests about the fiction category being "fixed" didn't go over near so well as I had hoped.

Kelsey Grammer--or, as I prefer to call him, Gelsey Krammer--is a superb comic actor, I look forward to seeing him on Broadway in La Cage aux Folles, but, politically, what a dunce. An amiable dunce willing to lend his shiny brow and melodious intonations to whatever idiot conservative parade float happens along.

His latest gaucherie is as pitchman for RightNetwork, which appears to be what Pajamas Media aspired to be when it first rattled the bars of its baby crib--a one-stop shop for anti-liberal infotainment: the anti-Daily Kos and -Daily Show packed into a single inedible monster hoagie.

RightNetwork, which clearly has some serious evil money behind it, presents a much cleaner, sprucer facade than Pajamas Media or Tucker Carlson's Daily Cistern (no links to either), and pretends to ride tall and proud in the saddle, in the spirit of Ronald Reagan welcoming the American sunrise with a grateful smile for everything God and liberty have granted this great nation. "Here you’ll find a fresh daily perspective that is unapologetically American," declares RightNetwork founder David Jaget, an obvious dupe and dope.** "Everything will be presented with humor, insight, wit, and an optimistic turn."

Originality, that's another thing altogether, since one of his contributors is Victor Davis Hanson, who gives ubiquity a disreputable name, and another essay "Thank God for Market Capitalism" is a pigeon spattering of cliches that could have dropped from any blog that finds Thomas Sowell a truly groovy cat.

Peel back the happy floorwaxed shine of RightNetwork and beneath the tiles is a much grimier enterprise, with a lot of corrosive loathing eating away.

Its editor-in-chief is Gerard Van der Leun, a pious humbug who authored a sneering diatribe against post-Katrina New Orleans that didn't even try to tuck its racism in and routinely trashes liberals and feminists in lavatorial language . Only last year this refugee from Pajamas Media was announced as the editor-in-chief of the hapless, hopeless QOR Club, a right-leaning private membership club started by some foolish papa bear in which rubes were invited to pay $19.95 a month (!), to read such witty Restoration fops as James Lileks and Jeff Goldstein limbering up their fingers at the Liberace keyboard. Boy, you can imagine how swell that worked out, asking the last remaining retirees who remember the old Saturday Review to cough nearly $240 a year to read a bunch of guys that they could mostly read through their bifocals for free elsewhere (since none of them were giving up their regular blog gigs). Last time I looked, The QOR Club was a shuttered ghost town, and Jeff Goldstein is still doing monthly blegs to pay for the capital letters required to proclaim OUTLAW! at the end of his sporadic posts. So I guess QOR's limping fade into the sunset left Van der Leun with time on his hands to curate this agitprop installation.

The like-minded bloggers picked from the right-wing bingo machine to contribute to RightNetwork are on their best Sunday-go-to-church behavior here, gulling the gullible.

Francis Porretto, for example, makes his RightNetwork debut with a clanger of second-hand homilies called "The American Christian: A Believer Among the Dissenters" which includes a favorite standby of such tendentious testimonials--a pivotal scene in which a glib liberal is flabbergasted to find himself in the presence of a human envoy of a Dissenting Opinion:

In a recent exchange at a party, which began as a discussion of political subjects, my companion startled me by announcing that his low opinion of President George W. Bush is because of Bush's Christianity. To him, it means that Bush is wooden of intellect; that he needs "the comfort of an imposed structure." I was struck speechless, though only for a moment.

"Are you aware that you're speaking to a practicing Catholic?"

It was his turn to be speechless. Our conversation had been conducted on a very high intellectual plane up to then. He wanted to say "but you're much too smart for that." I could see the "but" forming on his lips. He refrained, turned away, and sought another conversation elsewhere.

Imaginary conversations always end so neatly, with the liberal slouching off with his lizard tail between his or her legs...

Porretto's RightNetwork piece is mostly jejune, a string of banal rosary beads making a very dull click.

But pay a visit to Porretto's home blog, Eternity Road, where he flatters himself with the tin crown of "Curmudgeon Emeritus," and those celestial hues of Virgin Mary blue darken into blood red. Porretto is notorious for his anti-Muslim hostility-mongering, advocating that Muslims in this country, even those who are law-abiding American citizens, should be made unwelcome, pointed toward the exit door since (as he likes to bold it) there's no such thing as a moderate Muslim. How do make Muslims feel unwelcome in their own country. Refuse to do with business with them, he has advocated, or doing business with those willing to do business with them. Be willing to get in their faces and dare them to do something about it, such as wearing a taunting "Infidel" t-shirt into Chuck E. Cheese:

Clearly, that "Infidel" T-shirt (preferably a sweatshirt version, if available) should become a Curmudgeonly wardrobe staple. Your Curmudgeon is eager to deliver the following "explanation" to any Muslim offended:

It offends you? Good! That's why I'm wearing it. I want to offend Muslims wherever they may roam. Muslims offend me with their ceaseless denunciations of Israel, their whining about "profiling" and "Islamophobia," and their demands that America and its institutions change to accommodate them. But tell me, please: How much does it offend you? Enough to abandon your sexist, violent, hate-filled pseudo-religion? Enough to provoke you to blows? Enough for you to wait until my back is turned, and then strike me like the coward you are? Or enough to get you to emigrate and leave America in peace? Take your time; I'll wait.

All in a perfectly level, unstressed tone, of course. And with one hand on a weapon.

Nice. Exactly what Jesus teaches in the New Testament, if you stare at the Bible without your reading glasses long enough for the watery words to rearrange themselves into a ransom note or anonymous threat.

Porretto flexed his heroic mouth muscles a year ago, but evidently Muslim Americans didn't take the threatening hint, so now he has upped the ante, announcing that on September 11th he intends to burn a copy of the Koran.

Use the tragedy of that day as an opportunity to hold "a Koran bonfire."

We are not the Americans who fought World Wars I or II. We have far greater material resources than they, but we haven't demonstrated the same moral courage or resolve. Unless and until we marshal our spirits to the imperative task of our age, our bodies will remain flaccid.

We can begin by burning a Koran on September 11. Your Curmudgeon plans to do so himself. Are you willing to join him?

Uh, no. But some of his readers are, assuming their minders allow them to play with matches.

Now that the crackpot pastor who got this 9/11 Koran-burning party started has canceled his firebug plans, I wonder if Porretto will carry on nevertheless--"going rogue," as it were.

Either way, this is the caliber of contributor that RightNetwork is running.

*A pun on the title of Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives, a landmark work of critical analysis of which I'm sure you're all familiar.

**"I once heard a personal story about Glenn Beck from a bus driver named Jerry, and it moved me deeply though I hadn’t even been a witness to the events."