October 2002 Archives

As Christopher Hitchens points out today in Andrew Sullivan's Book Club,which still pales in comparison with the moral focus of the discussion we've been having on this site, "the test of any serious person is his or her ability to handle contradictions, and to recognise them in himself or herself as well as in others, and then to confront them honestly."

So I wonder how Orwell would respond to the most important issue of our day: Whether or not Canadian singing sensation Avril Lavigne is a punk rocker. Just fine, I think. Orwell was remarkably presicent on this topic, writing in 1947, "you can totally dress in ties and hold a guitar and sing about destroying the mall, but, like, that doesn't make you a punk." In an essay called "Beware File-Sharing, Whatever That Is," he presaged the current wars between corporations that want to control images of youth culture, and the youth themselves, who sometimes want to be controlled. I imagine he, like all men, would have been at once repulsed by Britney Spears but also desirous of her. Who among us haven't woken up ashamed after a Britney-dream-induced night orgasm, and then prayed for a punk-rock backlash against that assembly-line sexpot succubus? Orwell struggled with dreams like that his whole life. In fact, I once had the honor of introducing the literary critic F.L Pritchett, who famously called his boyhood friend Orwell "the original see you later boy."

Still, is Lavigne genuine, or is she a bl8tant pop-cultural construction? She takes great pains, much as Lenin did qua Trotsky, to paint herself as the moral and intellectual opposite of Britney, going so far as to say, "omigod, I would never dress like a slut." But does that make her punk rock? I think that Avril Lavigne is SO not punk rock. But what do I know? What is punk rock, anyway? Any follower of popular music or the leftist press should be asking themselves the same.

So I suggest a change in the question stream, my friends. From here, the Orwell discussion changes to an Avril Lavigne discussion. Or a punk-rock discussion. Or the interstice between the two. Pose questions to the email address to your left, and they will get answered. Sully and Hitch say this strand is beneath their abilities, but to them, I say, "Chill out, whatcha yellin' for? Lay back, it's all been done before. And if you could only let it be, you will see."

This could get complicated.

The liberal press has taken much delight in recent days in my old friend Mickey Kaus' refutation of my refutation of a June 2000 article I wrote called "Putin Would Never Gas His Own People Unless It Was For Their Own Good, Also, There Is A Definite Rise In Left-Wing Racism In This Country." The fact that the article was due to be published in the New York Times but never saw the light of print is just another indication of the double standard that exists in the yellowed halls of the Gray Lady. Yes, Howell Raines can hide behind the fact that my assignment was supposed to be a profile of John McCain and instead I produced a 10,000-word dissection of the disintegrating intellectual standards of the left. But unlike most Times reporters, I write what I know, and no one knows more about academic disengenousness than me. Maybe King Howell and his hard-working team of Holocaust deniers should chew on that for a while.

On the street, strangers ask me all the time, "Neal, how can you be in favor of unlimited detention without charges for randomly-chosen Arab-Americans, but still support general amnesty for prominent Internet columnists accused of plagiarism and sexual harrassment?" It's an interesting question. If I were arrested and not given right to an attorney, I'd raise holy hell. I would also file a class-action discrimination suit on behalf of the bi-curious, a group of people to which I belong unapologetically. And I have nothing but sympathy for the jailed, unless they're my enemies, or unless they deserved their sentences. Now please shut up and let me make my points, one-by-one.

1. The peacenik crowd and the U.N. need to understand that this is a war, and people are going to die. Even though 117 people perished in Russia over the weekend, Vladimir Putin did the right thing, because terrorists kill people, and we have to be able to show that we, also, can kill people, even the wrong people, so terrorists will be afraid of us.

2. Gore Vidal's writing is juvenile, and anyone who disagrees with me is a Mr. Poopy Pants.

3. Karl Marx raped children, and enjoyed himself while doing it. I have documented proof. Take that, Noam Chomsky.

4. The view of the beach from my back deck is simply remarkable. Roger! More brandy! Chop-chop!

5. Anyone who calls me a moral hypocrite is themselves guilty of hypocrisy, particularly if they are a hypocrite themselves.

6. Those who call my opinions inconsistent had better do so consistently, or else I'll point out that they, too, are inconsistent, and probably also hypocritical.

7. By hypocritical, I mean holding me up to an unfair double-standard, and by inconsistent, I mean not consistent.

8. By double standard, I mean two standards.

9. By two, I mean not one.

10. Jean Carnahan stooped to a new low this weekend by calling her opponent a "dirty-kneed faggot." Who says homophobia isn't alive and well among the Democrats of Missouri, which is a slave state?

11. I have photographs of Jean Carnahan engaged in lesbian activity.

12. I, the Lord, am your God, who led you out of Egypt to be your God. I, the Lord, am your God.

The trickle of Orwell questions turned into a slightly faster trickle over the weekend. I told Hitch to grab a cup of coffee. We found Sullivan weeping in the hall closet of his beachfront home.

"What's the matter, Sully?" I said.

"Paul Wellstone," he said.

"I know," I said. "We're all sad."

"I didn't want him to die!" Sully said. "Not now! Not like this! I'd barely begun to bash him!"

When you're feeling low, a little George Orwell is a perfect tonic. That's what I say. So I whipped out my PC laptop, sat my peers down, and began to blog.

C. Monks, whose website just celebrated its 100th visitor, asks, "Who would win in a fight, Orwell or a bear?"

NP: A bear.

CH: Orwell. In Homage to Catalonia, he describes a moment when a captain shoots a bear while riding an elephant, but steps around a puddle first. He was the foremost chronicler of the absurdity of the tragedy of the human predicament.

AS: I'd like to point out that even though I wrote a piece this summer in The New Republic titled "Paul Wellstone, American Lenin," I still respected the late senator's right to express himself. And I'd like to add that the following passage from the piece:"If sedition has a human face, it's Wellstone's. If lack of patriotism is a virtue, then Wellstone is a saint," has been misquoted and misinterpreted by my multitude of enemies.

M.S. Fonda, starting a disturbing trend of Orwell-question-writers who for some reason don't include their full names, asks, "What was Orwell's favorite color--Black or white?"

CH: Orwell was always on the right side of the color line. He didn't play favorites.

NP: Black.

AS: I think he preferred black, unlike Harry Belafonte, who, as I bravely pointed out in Salon, is a bigot. To show preference for one race over another is racism, pure and simple, and anyone who disagrees with me is a nigra-loving ass-head.

Howard Peirce of Ohio poses a question for Hitch and Sully. "Sirs," he writes, "In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell describes a Jew. Given the opportunity, would Orwell agree with your views on the Middle East Crisis unreservedly, or after due consideration?"

CH: I don't know what you mean by Middle East "crisis." There are no crises, only failures of nerve.

AS: Without the Jews, I'd be nothing.

This is an interesting softball from A.A. Shickey. It goes: "If you were eating dinner with Orwell and had to eat three other people from history, Who would you eat?"

NP: If you're talking about history, and if eating is loosely defined, I would eat the 1976 version of Lynda Carter, Marilyn Monroe around 1953, and all the Go-Gos, who count as one person, circa about 1979. Orwell wouldn't be Down and Out anymore, if you know what I'm saying.

CH: A frivolous answer from a frivolous person. I would eat Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, and Princess Diana, all of whom deserve to be devoured by two superior intellects.

AS: I would eat Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and Howell Raines of the New York Times, thereby making the world safe for democracy again. Orwell despised the Times, and he'd dig in right next to me.

Moacis, from the University of Chicago, so he MUST be well-educated, asks, "In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell spends a lot of pages discussing marksmanship and the uncertainty of hitting a target over a long distance. Would he have been better off ditching the left-wing socialists and joining the right-wing and incredibly facha US Army Engineer Company?"

NP: Probably not.

CH: No. Orwell despised both the right and the left.

AS: I want to clarify a recent post of mine that went, "Paul Wellstone might as well be Pol Pot. He masks his innate desire for the fall of the west with phony populism. And it may be likely that he has sex with underage girls." I was speaking metaphorically. I have nothing but sympathy for the family and friends of this mercifully deceased left-wing opponent of the state.

NP: Andrew Sullivan's opinions are his own. They are not necessarily endorsed by the keeper of this blog.

AS: Shut up, you red bastard.

Exactly one week ago today, I said in this blog about the D.C. sniper:

"I'm 98 percent certain that he's a convert to Islam. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if recently he's changed his last name from Williams to Muhammad."

Then I went on:

"Evidence seems to show that he spent 10 years in the armed forces, stationed mainly at Fort Lewis, Wash., and Fort Ord., Calif. It's also likely that, based on his shooting patterns, he spent time with the military in Saudi Arabia and Germany, serving as a combat engineer, a role which didn't have any sniper training. And he's black. Black, I tell you! Why is the P.C. media, which is so quick to convict white people of crimes, afraid to tell us this?"

But, as usual, our myopic mainstream journalistic institutions failed to call on me, and, as usual, more death and mayhem resulted.

Last night, I was surprisingly released from prison as the French government announced a program of general amnesty for all political bloggers, or, as they call them in France, blagueurs. And just in time, too, for it appears that Chief Charles Moose, using his singularly lethal brand of Moose Justice, has finally caught the maniacal D.C. sniper.

But for all the media attention afforded this subject, it appears that no one is pointing out that the sniper lived in a house made almost entirely of cheese. For a brief time in the mid-80s, I was black and belonged to the Nation Of Islam. I happened to be present during one of Louis Farrakhan's most lunatic speeches. I still have the transcription by my bedside. It went: "Now, they're trying to get Ol' Farrakhan. Well, they ain't got him yet!" (15 minutes of thunderous applause.) The Sorcerer Yakub said, you shall go into the valleys of Virginia and Washington, and you shall make yourself a house of processed cheese, and you shall take on a youthful protege and feed him nothing but crackers. If he gives into the cheese temptation, he is unholy. And a Jew!"

At the time, the speech sounded somewhat loony to me, but Farrahkhan's words appear to have gained a foothold in the real world. When will people realize that the Nation of Islam is an enemy not only of America, but also Islam, and, let's face it, artisanal cheese makers the world over? It should be shut down by the government immediately, and Farrakhan jailed for crimes against the state. Also, you may not be aware that the Nation of Islam is almost completely one hundred percent funded by The Nation magazine, which should also be shut down by the government immediately.

But enough for now. You'll hear more from me on this topic in the coming days and weeks. For now, we should just thank goodness that we are, once again, immortal citizens of the greatest country in the history of the world.

Neal Pollack has been safely ensconced in a French gulag, where he's currently trying to entice a bespectacled genius embezzler to help him escape. Meanwhile, this blog will proceed normally, with answers to questions about George Orwell provided by Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. The questions have been pouring in at the rate of two a week, so we'd better hop to the plate, much like the ageless Barry Bonds.

Send your Orwell questions to npblog@aol.com, and they will be answered in a timely fashion. Timely fashions provided by Kenneth Cole, Neal's favorite designer.

Colin Carlson asks, "That Julia chick must have had some pretty nice cans, right?"

CH: Ah, yes. But not nearly as nice as Rosemary's in Keep The Aspidistra flying. I am a literary critic of some merit, you know, and I must say that the vision of a young girl deprived of her prime and reduced to drudgery and shame is a 'trope' which one would have not wished, as a campaigner against needless poverty and ignorance, to be without. You must excuse me if I ramble, for even though I'm lucid as always, I'm also blind drunk.

O'Brien in Chicago says: "Andrew -- First of all, megadittoes! As you've said you've read virtually all of Orwell (while I've only made it through the first page of Animal Farm -- it's no Charge to Keep!) I wanted to know if Orwell's prescience extended into practical matters affecting us proles; namely, should I take the Eagles and the points this weekend? Hitch, this one's for you. I've heard that Orwell bashed Mother Theresa while you've written a book denouncing Gandhi (or something like that; I could look it up but that would involve me rising from my chair which I cannot do because the sunlight is illumining the scotch in my tumbler in a particularly heartbreaking manner), I was wondering -- disregarding your courageous atheism for a moment -- which of these two oppressors is in a hotter part of hell?"

AS: I will answer both those questions, because Hitch has fallen asleep. The Eagles are always a good bet, for they soar like America soars, unlike the Redskins, who are named for terrorists, or the Cowboys, who just plain suck, or the Vikings, who suck and also practice socialized medicine. The only team I would take over the Eagles would be the Patriots, or perhaps the Los Angeles Lubes.

For the second question, I believe that the hottest part of hell should be reserved for the Chechen monsters who took over the Russian theater yesterday. As a great fan of the Russian theater, and having played Uncle Vanya in a production at the Kennedy School of Government, I'm appalled. The U.S. should deliver unholy fire unto Chechnya as soon as possible. We will occupy the Chechen capital by sundown on Halloween.

CH: Snnnnnnnnnork!

Yesterday in Paris, a three-judge French panel found me guilty of "inciting racial hatred through pretentious writing" and sentenced me to ten years of hard labor on an impenetrable island in the South Pacific, where I am to be given the nickname Papillon, or, in English, "he who makes paper." Obviously, I'm not happy about this, because I have tickets for game six of the World Series. But it was perhaps inevitable that I become the predominant free-speech martyr of my age.

My trial stemmed from controversial comments I made in my weekly column in Le Monde, where I said that all Muslims "carried the blood of innocents on their filthy hands" and that "The Koran isn't even worth masturbating into." When a firestorm of criticism singed my ears in subsequent weeks, I amended my comments, making reference to "parsimonious, untrustworthy Jews." I also called the Pope a "cabbage-brained Christ fucker." Unfortunately, that didn't solve the problem. It only exacerbated it.

In sending me up the river, Judge Charles Azanvour said, "we can only hope that this sentence rids us of the Pollackian menace once and for all. Mother France cannot afford to have someone this pretentious on its soil. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go have dinner with the visiting American writer Jonathan Franzen."

The only dissent in my case came from Jean de Florette, a good-hearted but ultimately doomed hunchback, who said, "I believe that Pollack's blog has done more to aid the United States' noble War On Terror than anyone else's. As John Burns' excellent articles in the New York Times have pointed out, Pollack first came up with the idea that Saddam Hussein should release all political prisoners. Without Pollack's writing, we would be lost. I am staggered by his prescience."

Alas, the hunchback was then beaten to death by the large-framed lackey of an uncaring landlord. His beautiful and ultimately doomed daughter Manon looked on, crying silent tears. Then she came to my jail and blew me within an inch of sanity. Phew. I needed that.

Now I rot in a French holding cell, waiting to be freed, but holding out little hope. The Bush Administration isn't going to help me because of Gerhard Schroeder's support for my case. My dear friends Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan have their hands full defending Orwell from a gaggle of college-aged Communists. So it looks like I'm going to island prison for awhile.

They tell me I only get one blog from here in The Hole, or, as the French call it, L'Hole. So I bid you adieu for now, my friends. Send me nice emails if you get a chance. Try to carry on the good work in my absence. Never forget: We are vigilant soldiers in a war without end. If you slip, I'm watching, and I will nail you to the wall.

Je ne regrets rein,

NP

You may have noticed that my entries have recently decreased in frequency, down to one post a day from my usual five originals plus a telling quote, ironically deployed, cribbed off an especially deluded member of the liberal media elite. As is my fate, I've been traveling. I've recently returned from Damascus, where I followed the exploits of one Major Lawrence. Extraordinary man, that Lawrence. We really could use more like him as we prepare to take Aquba from the rear.

Then, on Thursday at New York University, I'll participate in a panel discussion on George Orwell with Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens, David Lloyd George, Maxine Keyser, and the overrated Jason Sehorn of the football Giants. It should be lively, and I encourage you all to show up and cheer for me against lesser intellects.

Meanwhile, between Damascus and New York, I write to you from Rome, the eternal city, where I've just had the privilege of returning from a Bruce Springsteen concert.

Since 1972, I've seen more than 500 Springsteen shows, but I enjoy him most in Europe. Monday night’s show in Roma was perhaps the best ever; he played all my favorites, including a solo piano version of "Darkness At The Edge of Forever," a rousing, anthemic "Home Is For the Hungry," and an acoustic accordion rendition of "Dream Heart Deferred." When the E Street Band launched into "Betty's Place," from his new album "The River," the crowd seemed to elevate above the Piazza del Popolo. The Boss performed with a spirit and panache that he sometimes lacks at home. For the Italians, he didn't have to prove it all night, but somehow, he proved it anyway.

"Bruce-a!" shouted a man from the audience in somewhat accented English. "I love-a you! I want you to meet my mother!"

It warmed my heart that foreigners could see the best of what American culture has to offer. There are two ways to look at America from abroad right now. One is the wrong way, the left-wing way, which portrays George Bush and his evil band of brigands as Bible-toting gun-happy plutocratic monsters bent on destroying all that is sane and good in the world, not caring how many prostitutes they shoot up when they bust into the saloon. Then there’s the real America; the one where a working-class kid from New Jersey can work with class and meet a bunch of guys in New Jersey and start a band, getting on the cover of Time magazine before he's 25 but eventually having all his hopes and dreams sucked dry by a meaningless lawsuit and then finding himself reborn as an accidental patriot and then marrying a supermodel and becoming uncomfortable with his multi-million dollar house and then recasting himself as a sad acoustic troubadour and then rising to the occasion on America's darkest day. That's the American life that we all live, and know, and love so well.

I'd like to think that if Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Louis Armstrong were alive today, they would have been in Rome with me last night, singing along at the top of their lungs: "Cadillac, Cadillac, out the door, out the back. Da di da da doo, da di doo da di. Riding down the highway like a big old dinosaur!" A little rock-and-roll would have been a hell of a lot of fun for them back in the day when they were writing the Constitution. Like the man says. You can't start a fire without a spark.

Earlier this year, I was victimized by Tristan Devin, editor of Slipshod Magazine, a fine Internet humor site. And when I say victimized, I mean interviewed via email. I now reprint the interview in its entirety, except that I've changed some of the answers to make me seem smarter.

SLIPSHOD. I'll open with a few fun icebreaker questions. Tell me, Neal Pollack, author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, have you ever been indicted?

Neal Pollack. Not on the federal level.

SLIPSHOD. Interesting. Well then, answer me this--who is your favorite country/western entertainer?

NP. There are so many from which to choose, but I am awfully partial to George Jones, who has lived the life, in all its ups and downs. It's not country if there's not tragedy.

SLIPSHOD. What made you want to become a writer?

NP. I'm not really good at anything else.

SLIPSHOD. Yes, I've heard that. But back to these great questions--my readers seem to enjoy it when authors relate comical anecdotes from their youths. Have you such an anecdote?

NP. When I was 12, I sat in gum, and I had gum all over my ass, and then a bunch of guys teased me because I had gum all over my ass, and then I told them to fuck off, and then they beat me up. My youth was pretty much like that.

SLIPSHOD. Hey, I just thought of this question: In the New York Times Book Review, which is included in the Anthology, Jack Shafer writes, "Like Dave Eggers and the other literary monkey-wrenchers at McSweeney's Quarterly Pollack longs to make literary noise of his own." Shafer seems to be of the school of thinking that maintains that the less funny a piece of writing is, the more literary it is. How do you respond to this? And how do you feel about the term "literary monkey-wrenchers"?

NP. Literature does not have to be serious to be literature. To be fair to Jack Shafer, I don't think he was saying that I had to be serious to be a good writer. He was saying that I had to write narrative, with character, and that being just a parodist would reduce me to one-trick pony status very quickly. It was constructive criticism. As for the term "literary monkey-wrenchers," well, that's journalism for you.

SLIPSHOD. How do you see yourself in regards to this question? In other words, do you think of yourself as a "writer" or a "humorist"?

NP. I definitely consider myself a writer first. Humorists write funny little novels about the quirks of regional life, or tender observations about fatherhood. I am a WRITER, in all caps. Or at least I want to be. I like to think my stuff has a harder edge. There's not much of it they can play on NPR, and I consider that a badge of honor. A little annoying, perhaps, because NPR would expand my audience, but it's still a badge.

SLIPSHOD. Do you have your own theory of humor?

NP. Yes. Do not revert to making fun of Carrot Top or Gallagher when you have no other material. And nothing Jay Leno says is funny. Also, when all else fails, bring in a dancing animal.

SLIPSHOD. Who are some of your favorite humorists?

NP. I really don't like the term humorist. But two of my favorite writers who use humor are Terry Southern and Hunter Thompson, in the latter case up until about 1972 or so. I like to see humor deployed in service of a larger cause, not just for quick laughs or to point out contemporary foibles. Those date very quickly, and so does the humor about them.

SLIPSHOD. To a certain extent I agree with you [about the term humorist]. I think it's unfortunate that if a writer can make the reader laugh out loud, he is immediately dispatched to the "humor" isle of the bookstore, forever doomed, as Woody Allen says, to sit at the kids' table. I'm also somewhat insulted when Thomas Pynchon is referred to as "hilarious" by his dust jackets (who are they to decide, damn jackets)--the same goes for JF Powers. Both of these men are great writers (whatever that means), but neither of them have done more in their funniest moments than raise the corners of my mouth. I think it is very difficult to make a person laugh, and I think that a writer who can make their reader laugh takes control of his reader in a way that other writers do not. I only wish that, in the world of books, the comic could be reconciled with the dramatic and the tragic as it occasionally is in the theater.

NP. I totally agree with you. People always tell me how "hilarious" Nabokov is, but I never laugh when I read Nabokov. I always feel as though I'm being force-fed medicine when I read him, though I recognize the beauty of the sentences and the intricate construction of the whole. All in all, I'd rather watch my DVD of Airplane! Humor is tough, though. I mean, Mark Twain is, objectively, funny, yet I have a hard time laughing at Twain because some of his work dates poorly. Most literature does, though at least with Twain the humor is often in service of narrative so you at least have the narrative to speed you along.

The reconcilation of humor with the dramatic and the tragic is something I've been struggling with in the novel I'm working on Well, "struggling" might be too strong a word. More like "praying for." I think I've probably failed. It takes a very special writer to achieve the balance. I don't know how special I am.

SLIPSHOD. An essay in the upcoming issue of SLIPSHOD claims that the key to being funny is a mixture of equal parts self-loathing and rampant narcissism. Do you agree with this? If not, why do you hate me?

NP. I don't hate you. I have no time to hate my acolytes. Why? Do you hate me?

SLIPSHOD. The "Why do you hate me?" remark was my feeble attempt at whimsy. I am more interested in your opinions on the comic mind. The writers and humorists whom I've met have all seemed to carry a Yeti-sized ego around with them (myself included). Perhaps this is necessarily so, since these people maintain the expectation that others want to read what they have to write. But while the most serious and literary minded writers have tended to lack a sense of irony about themselves and their profession, the humorist (or the funny-writer, as it were) has tended to be self-aware and self-deprecating in the extreme, sometimes to a debilitating extent. Do you find this to be so? If not, do you have any opinions on what brings the funny-writer to his funny?

NP. I think funny writers bound all over the map. Sometimes "serious" writers are so serious that they end up having little to say about their craft, or they all say the same bullshit about erasing the boundaries between high and low art, writing in a soundproof room, blah blah. Humor writers often bring more insight to the table, because I think they are required to be more honest. The funniest writers are funny because they tell the truth, and the truth is funny.

SLIPSHOD. Which is funnier, soup or pizza?

NP. Nothing in the world is funnier than soup. Or more delicious.

I dearly apologize for the lateness of today's blog. Last night was largely spent in the emergency room for infuriating reasons, which I will elucidate below. As "The Ring" shows us, technology, our savior, will destroy us all. Or maybe sometimes we just want to be scared.

As you know, I recently threw my PC into Puget Sound and switched to a Mac, which I simply loved because of its easy graphic interface and its infinite portability. My blogs have grown far more lucid since I began using Old Crappy, which I named after my mentor at Oxbridge, Sir Francis Crapshoot. Last night, I was merrily blogging away, providing conclusive proof that the Clinton Administration provided Pakistan with weapons-grade plutonium, all the while giving backrubs to North Korean diplomats. Then I found an amazing Al Gore quote from 1994 that I planned to deploy as conclusive proof that the Democrats hate America and that George Bush, far from being our President, is actually Jesus Christ, or at least a Christ-like figure, ascendant in the west.

Well, my blogging was going so well, my leaps of deduction so brilliant, that I got horny. Fortunately, Old Crappy has a built-in expandable penis port. Mmm. Thought I'd give it a try. I dropped my pants, straddled the desk, and stuck it in. Immediately, Old Crappy began to vibrate. I gripped the sides of the desk and moaned. It took all my energy to click on the optional $99 teabagging button. Ohhhhhhh. Godddddddd.

The phone rang. Shit! I looked at the caller ID. The New York Times. At last, they were calling to apologize for ignoring me. It's about time that Stalinist paper displayed some diversity of opinion. They would probably even up my word rate.

Without removing my penis from the penis port, I answered the phone, "I'm calling from the New York Times," said a voice.

"Yes?" I said.

"I see you only have Sunday delivery. We're offering a discounted daily rate..."

I hung up. How dare a left-wing telemarketer interrupt what was proving to be a groundbreaking session of autoeroticism? Well, shit, I wasn't in the mood anymore, and Hannity & Colmes was going to be on soon. I hit the Eject button. Nothing.

Again, I tried ejecting, this time simultaneously pulling on my penis with my other hand. Still nothing. Goddamn! I tried a couple more times. Nope.

I called customer support.

"My penis is stuck in the penis port!" I said.

A few minutes of laughter ensued on the other end

"Can you, snort snort, sniff, gzzzsnork, bring it into the dealer?"

"Of course not!" I said. "I can't drive with my dick in a computer!"

"BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH! Sorry, snort, snort. We'll send someone to your house."

About an hour later, the doorbell rang. I had Roger answer it. The tech guy came into my office, saw me standing over my desk, and burst out laughing.

"Quit it," I said.

"Sorry," he said.

"Help me."

"We need to find some lube."

He grabbed a bottle on a shelf next to my desk and squirted it into the port.

"Does that loosen things up?" he said.

I looked at the bottle. He'd picked up my Minty-Fresh Testostogrease. Goddamn it! Within minutes, I was going to be huge.

"We have to get this out, now!" I said. "You don't know what this stuff does to me! I...I...will engorge!"

Our best efforts led to nothing, and soon I hugified. The problem grew worse. I write this from my hospital bed. My computer was removed after a five-hour surgery. Let's just say I won't be teabagging for a while. I'll have to channel my sexual energy into my writing.

And I'm switching back to a PC.

As I reported in a space slightly below this one a couple of days ago, I have finally given up on my PC, which has been spouting pro-Palestinian rhetoric for weeks now. My anti-virus scan can do nothing to stop it. The last straw came on Monday, when my screen saver suddenly morphed into a picture of a naked Howell Raines skipping merrily arm-in-arm with Yasir Arafat across a field of poppies. Seemingly, the anti-war left is doing whatever it can to censor voices of truth. So, I've switched to a Mac.

What a delightful decision! I've only been using this new Macintosh computer for seven hours, but I already feel freer to express my hard-fought learned opinions than ever before. The graphic interface is simple yet coherent. The keyboard is just the right size for my small hands, yet just the right texture for their rough-hewn-ness. And I simply love the built-in penis port, which is adjustable. A virtual teabagging unit costs only $99, and an "air" port can also be purchased, and I think I'll get one as soon as that check from the Manchester Weasel arrives. Really. You should all go buy Macs as soon as possible. They are politically neutral, perfectly rational machines. If George Orwell had worked on a computer (and can anyone doubt that he would have had his own blog), he would have definitely used a Mac.

Speaking of the great muse of proper thought, the questions are coming in for myself, Hitch, Sully, and Andrew W.K. at the rate of one every six hours. We are having trouble keeping up, but still encourage you to let this feature percolate. It's proving very popular with the cognosenti, who should know.

Jim Arndorfer, of Chicago, writes, "Was Orwell being antisemitic by posing pigs as the oppressors in Animal Farm?"

CH: Your question is beneath contempt. It is the lowest form of argument. If you can't see past the basic fallacy in the central premise of your line of inquiry, then I can't even begin to debate you. This interpretation of Orwell, which has long been discredited, was first hatched by Lionel Trilling, whose reputation declines with every wisp of sunlight that streams through my Jakarta hotel room. Ohhh! My aching head! Steward, bring me some fucking whiskey!

Jim asks Sully, "What was your most Orwell moment?"

AS: I am most proud of standing up against the New York Times after they refused to publish my piece, In Defense of Faggotry: A Conservative Argument For Slanderous Namecalling. But in general, since September 11, 2001, I have been the walking reincarnation of Orwell on earth, only I dress better.

Blimat asks: "Tim Blair, Tony Blair, Eric Blair? Coincidence or insidious conspiracy?"

NP: Don't forget Blair from The Facts of Life. Or Blair Underwood, or Blair Brown, star of The Days And Nights of Molly Dodd.

CH: Shut up, Pollack, you twit.

AS: Don't trivialize this situation. The world is at war!

"While we are on the subject," blimat writes, "Lena Olin and Katrina vanden Heuvel are indeed babes."

AWK:
We're not gonna die
You can never kill us
We're not gonna die
You can never hurt us

We dent, We rob
We choke, We gun
We kill, We stab
We rob, We steal

We dent, We rob
We choke, We gun
We kill, We stab
We rob, We steal

Party 'til you puke...

GO!...

NP: Indeed.

Felicia, who writes, "like Madonna, Cher, and many people in Afghanistan, I only have one name," has posed a question to our panel. It goes: "Descriptions of Orwell's filthy little room sound a lot like descriptions of Quentin Crisp's filthy little room. Could George's dislike of "pansies" be evidence of latent homosexuality and self-loathing?"

AS: Let me take that one. As the world's leading expert on blatant homosexuality and self-loathing, it's become very clear to me over the last 10 years that the Democrats have hijacked the so-called "gay rights" agenda, manipulating gays and lesbians into believing that there's only one proper way to vote. Well, I'm here to say that gays and lesbians are just like everyone else, only more so, and anyone who disagrees with me is a Krugman-reading sniper and child molester.

AWK: So let's get a party going (let's get a party going) Now it's time to party and we'll party hard (party hard) Let's get a party going (let's get a party going) When it's time to party we will always party hard Party hard (party hard, party hard, party hard party hard, party hard, party hard party hard, party hard, party hard...)

The perceptive and well-read habitues of this blog have chimed in with some George Orwell-related questions for myself, Christopher Hitchens, and Andrew Sullivan. At last, the discussion may begin. Finally, the evils of Islamofascism will shiver in the clear light of printed truth.

Hitch providers answers from his secret hutch in Samarkand, where he has prophetically established himself on the border of the next front in the War On Terror. Sully responds from P-Town, which is becoming somewhat gentrified but still boasts a lively nightlife. I am forced to write from my neighborhood Kinko's due to the poor performance of my Windows XP. That's it. No more PCs for me. Tomorrow I go out and buy a Mac. I can afford it, and will make the switch. I'm available for television commercials to testify to my choice.

Hitch will answer as CH, Sullivan as AS, and I as NP. I encourage you to continue to send in questions as this discussion develops over the coming weeks. You are hereby directed to the email link to the left. Keep in mind that in future postings, we will be joined by now-legendary party rocker Andrew W.K., who is working on an album of Orwell-related songs.

Our first three questions come from the mysterious Ms. J.S. Van Buskirk, of Atlanta, who asks, "Why should I care what Hutchins and Sullivan think about Orwell? I would rather know what they think of me."

CH: That's HITCHENS, you nincompoop.

AS: I've never heard of you.

CH: Either have I.

Now she asks: "Why did that nice big dumb horse have to die in Animal Farm? That was sad."

NP: I'll take that one. Orwell called the death of the big dumb horse (who was named Horace in the watered-down Disney cartoon version of Animal Farm), a deus ex machina. Roughly translated, that means "God used to be a machine." The horse is a clear metaphor for the brutality of Soviet rule. Orwell visited Poland on vacation in 1940, perhaps an unfortunate choice, and he wrote, "Hey. The Nazis are bad. But if the Russians take over this country, people are going to STARVE."

Finally, Ms. Van Buskirk queries: "Did George really 'Oar' well?"

CH: I believe the critic F.R. Leavis, quoting the historian E.P. Thompson in a book I read while interviewing dissidents in North Korea, once said, "It is the duty of every alert observer of human affairs to row crew at least once in their lives, for an oarsman is a slave of empire, and an empire can only be truly understood by its slaves."

Dennis M. Lensing, of Texas, asks: "What was Orwell's position on teabagging (or did he have more than one)? And, how did this position influence his materialist ontology?"

CH: Not long ago, I was rereading some essays by the late C. Vann Woodward, the great chronicler of the American South. That has nothing to do with the question at hand, but I wanted to mention it anyway.

AS: I believe I can answer. Orwell writes, in The Road to Wigan Pier, "Somewhere along the road to Wigan Pier, I encountered a supplicant who offered to 'lick' my 'balls.' It was then that I began to understand the subtle desbasements of empire." Orwell was, in essence, a sex-starved prude, but he had the moral clarity to understand that certain enemies of the state, like Paul Krugman of the New York Times, must be stopped at any cost.

Finally, A Mr. David Grover writes, "What do you think of the clear-sighted, grey-eyed rock-jawed opinions on the dangers of nuclear weapons George Orwell expressed in the movie "The Peacemaker"? His lissome red-headed co-star summarized them best with the sage observation: "The man who wants seven nuclear weapons I'm not afraid of. Its the man who wants just one."

AS: I would say that whatever George is speaking, whether it's Bush, Bush, Orwell, Clooney, or Washington, they have shown themselves to be our true allies in the fight against terror.

CH: I agree. And only Andrew and I have the moral courage to speak against our actual enemies, not the ones imagined by the useless and outdated mandarians of the far left.

NP: Me, too! Don't forget me! I have moral courage!

CH: You don't count.

Now that Australia has felt the fullest wrath of our current War on Terror, we must thank God that the Australian residents of the blogosphere are finding the courage to express their opinions. In particular, I must single out my dear friend Tim Blair for displaying unique moral clarity and sound judgment in this time of grief and crisis. Just like after September 11 in the U.S., Australia's best journalists will rise from the ashes to cut down their ideological enemies, and the worst will show their only true color. Yellow. In this war, those who question the subsequent actions of the attacked give breast-fed succor to the enemy. If you oppose war, as Australia now knows, you are a Fifth Columnist anti-Semite coward unable to grasp history's basest realities. I recall my own struggles to make sense of the world after history's darkest day. It took me at least five hours to gain the courage to post. Since then, I've received more than 500,000 discrete page views, making me the Internet's Number One Source For News-Based Opinion.

I believe it was George Orwell who said, "A beast bitten but not killed will taste the blood of the enemy on his tongue." The fact that he was, in fact, referring to the actress Lotte Lenya does not diminish my point. Online pundits down under, I am with you. Know that. The enemy howls before us in contempt, and we must blow them up, whoever they are. I want to lick their bones for breakfast.

A reminder to my regular readers that I am still taking questions about George Orwell, to be answered by myself, Christopher Hitchens, and Andrew Sullivan. But people. If no one sends me questions, we can't answer them. That email link is just to the left.

Meanwhile, it appears that the delectable Lena Olin has joined the cast of my favorite ABC crime drama, Alias Grace. Every week since the show's debut, the thought of Jennifer Garner's sexy wigs have provided sweet relief from the overwhelming burden of my work. Now there's another hot tomato in the mix. I'm sending Roger to Sam's Club for a 24-pack of Kleenex.

I've had the pleasure of visiting Bali twice, once as a 17-year-old gadabout reveling in the pleasure of publishing my first novel, A Tale Of Young Men At War, and the second time in 1995, as a paid guest of the President Suharto Isn't Such A Bad Guy Coalition. I enjoyed many free drinks and free sunsets and the island's patented mix of carefree hippie partying, cheap muliticultural prostitution, and bohemian Hindu mysticism. But now Al Queda has struck again, and the naive anti-war left is on the run trying to explain another paradise lost. I think it's interesting how we haven't heard word one from Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter on this situation. Where is the hero of Plains now? Off enjoying the spoils of the Oslo Committee, I'm sure. But isn't that just like former "President" Carter? When the world calls him to duty, he runs and hides under his bed like a whining, simpering child. Let me ask you an interesting question, and perhaps you can provide an answer. Would Jimmy Carter have been in that disco, whooping it up like you or I, or would he have been miles away fingering the detonator, moaning about the "lust in his heart"? It's very interesting that I have the intellectual clarity, like Orwell, to even conceive of such a scenario.

While I have your attention, is it completely beyond the realm of possibility that Jimmy Carter is helping to fund the activities of the D.C.-area sniper? After all, it was "former" "President" "Carter," who coined, in his ONLY speech to the United Nations in 1977, the phrase "Dear Policeman, I Am God," and he has, in the past, shown interest in the Black Art of the Tarot. The pattern is clear. A maniac is killing innocent gas-station customers, but our Democratic leadership says nothing. Have any of the 23 Senators who dared oppose President Bush's noble war resolution spoken out against the Bali bombing or the sniper or the attack on the French tanker in Yemen or that guy in Kuwait who shot at our soldiers? Not unless they said something on the Sunday morning chat shows, which I always skip to watch J.B., Terry, Howie, and Jimmy, not to mention the sexy weather humor of Jillian Barberie.

Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan are joining me on this site sometime before the end of the year to discuss Hitch's runaway bestselling novel, Why Orwell Matters. If you have any questions regarding Orwell or Matters, please direct them here, and one of us will answer you in this most public of forums. And watch for next year, when the Pollack-Hitchens-Sullivan Speaking Truth To Power Orwell Express Bus hits the road for a 30-campus tour. Cornel West, we're crashing at your house!

An alert reader has sent me this story off the newswires. In case the link doesn't work, let me just say that you can now read German novels on toilet paper in public restrooms in Germany. It appears that the Germans have fulfilled my prophecy. I think I could go through Gunter Grass' The Flounder in about a month.

What do I mean by prophecy, you ask? Well, now I post my famous poem, which I wrote two years ago. It's available here for the first time ever in print. Next year it will become a rock song, but for now, enjoy it as verse. Cut, paste, and make it a phenomenon.

I WIPE MY ASS ON YOUR NOVEL

By Neal Pollack

Listen.

Can you hear it?

It is the sound

Of me

Wiping my ass

On your novel.

Feel.

Can you feel it?

It is the feel

Of me

Pressing your novel

Against my heaving ass.

Look.

Can you see it?

It is the sight

Of your super-absorbent novel

Clearing my grateful ass

Of the shit

Of your words.

American literature is a bloated turd!

A dietary disruption

In the colon of the world.

It cannot be swallowed or digested.

It does not nourish

It contains no vitamins

It is a restaurant

At a rest-stop

On a highway to oblivion.

It is in my ass,

And when I shit it out

Your novel

Is my scented salvation.

Thank you, DeLillo,

You wrote a long novel.

Thank you, Joyce Carol,

For a year’s worth of three-ply.

Thank you, history,

For historical novels

And a lifetime

Of wiping

My ass.

Smell.

Can you smell it?

It is the smell

Of my shit

On the spine

Of your novel.

Taste.

Can you taste it?

It is the taste

Of my shit

That tastes better

Than your novel.

You cannot moan

You cannot grovel

You cannot clear it

With a shovel.

My friends, I hate to

Burst your bubble.

Where is that Updike?

Here comes a double!

Sontag

Roth

Mailer

And Havel

I wipe my ass

Upon your novel!

Cannot give in to temptation to be didactic today. Must resist, even in face of reports that the U.S. has already developed a permanent strategy for post-war military occupation of Iraq. Must...resist...saying that the Bush Administration is using the genuine terror that American citizens feel, brought about because of an assault by tangible enemies, to install an illegitimate oil Raj in a country where we don't belong. That would be preachy. Cannot say that. Must stay funny. Must remain true to satirical purpose.

My satirist's powers are fading. Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Peace Prize on day when Congress hands ultimate warmongering powers to current President. Henry Kissinger speaks against military occupation on same day. I...can't....breathe.

Must....get.....Kryptonite....off....me!

I will sound a rare sincere note in today's blog on behalf of Mexico City's put-upon street vendors. An excellent article in The New York Times illuminates what is, to me, the central issue of urban life. Who controls the streets, and at what cost? For all the "broken windows" talk about New York City in the 90s, for all the tourist-friendly boosterism and reduced crime rates, can anyone doubt that Mayor Giuliani's war on food vendors and street artists left the city a somewhat sanitized version of its former self? Can anyone really claim that Chicago is a better city now that the Maxwell Street market has been replaced by a bland landscape of parking lots and dorm buildings? And what about cities that have not, for the most part, been gentrified, like Philadelphia? The Italian Market, trash-can fires, rotten vegetables and all, gives the city an "authentic" feel that so many American places lack.

The issues Mexico City is facing today have always been part of urban life. Balzac's novels, particularly Lost Illusions, describe Paris before the Third Republic gentrifiers began to plow the teeming city over, turning it into the visitor-friendly metrolpolis it is today. Dickensian London was a roiling repository of disease and injustice, but it was also a rollicking urban carnival. Today's modern cities, both European and North American, struggle with a dichotomy. Ethnic neighborhoods are often the most viscerally "interesting," but they also are poorer and more dangerous. But for people who actually live in those cities, the culture of those neighborhoods make the urban experience worthwhile. I've spent a lot of time in Amsterdam. People there go to neighborhood markets every week, but they don't spend a lot of time at museums. Such is how it should be. A city isn't healthy if it's wholly shaped in the image of the tourism board.

For Mexico, these issues are only intensified by poverty on the one hand and a strong tradition of street vending on the other. Do you really want to put thousands of people out of relatively legitimate work so upper-middle-class couples can stroll arm-in-arm through the park after the opera? It takes a leap of political imagination to think of the guy selling bootleg copies of bad U.S. pop music as an equal citizen to a billionaire fast-food magnate who wants untrammelled access to his restaurants. But that leap must be made.

After all, if the street vendors are put out of business, where do they go? This is not Mexico's elite class. It's not a choice of tamale vendor or law student. It's more a choice of tamale vendor or maquiladora worker, or criminal, or illegal immigrant. The choice for these people is that stark, the margin that thin.

From a purely selfish point of view, I like cities with street vendors. The best food I've eaten in Mexico has come off street-vendor carts, I wouldn't buy most of the crap the other vendors sell. But I defend their right to sell it, and I speak, I hope, for a large class of people who want to visit cities because of their real life, and their real culture, not some genteel facsimile. City life isn't only for the precious, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

Yours in the Revolution,
Che

I consider myself one of the luckiest people I know, but still I suffer from the working-parent blues. Every Wednesday, my heart breaks when I send my four-year-old to Brazilian dancing camp just so I can get my Weekly Standard column done. When I was in my 20s, the magazines I read promised that I could have it all: Children, a career, drugs, and an iguana farm, while still being true to myself and having at least three satisfying orgasms a week. Well, it all was a lie.

A recent study by the National Association Against the Advancement of Women indicated that seven of ten working mothers see their children, on average, five minutes or less a day. In Mexico, it's even worse. Sometimes I think about my daughters and what I will teach them when they are willing to sit down and shut up to listen to me for a change, but my mind is full of cotton because I'm so busy working and taking care of them and cooking dinner and planning parties and lecturing all over the country on just this very topic. A certain demographic definitely needs my support, and I'm here to give my message. As indicated to the left of this column, I'm available as a college speaker about the struggles of the working parent who has decided to have kids later in life. We don't want to give up our careers for the sake of parenthood but also don't want to give up parenthood for our careers. It's a Gordian knot that cannot be untied at one sitting.

One woman I know decided to wait until after her 50th birthday to have her first child. Fortunately, she works as a pirate captain and has a whole ship of babysitters to care for the child when she's busy. But we all can't be that lucky. Lawyers and broadcast executives don't have first mates, and my research has found that ordinary co-workers generally won't clean your monocle on demand.

Late in the game I've come to realize that life will fuck you raw. Give up all hope now, ladies. The gains of feminism have led to the losses of post-feminism, and the anti-feminists offer an oppressive fool's gold. Parenthood is a walking nightmare, as is working, and, in general, life is just a long slow miserable painful relentless slide to the grave. Your kids will never love you as much as you want them to. Blow them off and go score some kind bud. You've earned it.

There is no need here for me to analyze yesterday's President Bush speech. His hair was short, his arguments succinct, his moral clarity both moral and clear. I think that his forceful presentation should, once and for all, silence the 30 percent or so of the American population that still, against all reason, continues to wring its wet hanky of whiny anti-war petulance. Those who believe that Bush needs to provide "evidence" against the war have obviously neither participated in war or evidence-gathering. Every day, it becomes more obvious to me that my arguments on this topic are the only ones that matter.

I'm also glad that, finally, the President has told the American people the truth about Saddam Hussein's Nuclear Holy Warriors, who represent a terrible threat to all humanity. Now the facts about them can be told. The Nuclear Holy Warriors are four in number. Their names are War, Famine, Pestilence, and Disease. Several years ago, on a reporting trip to Baghdad, I met one of them. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto him over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Woe betide to man, I say, if Saddam Hussein gains control over the "beasts of the earth."

The one quibble I have with Bush's speech was his warning that a "very senior Al-Queda leader" has recently sought medical treatment in Baghdad. This is verifiable. I have pictures from a reliable source. But I will say: Baghdad is home to the only doctor in the world capable of dislodging a living porcupine from a human rectum. I wouldn't go to war, necessarily, because of some old man's unfortunate camping accident.

With the publication of Christopher Hitchens' delightful bildungsroman, "Why Orwell Matters," the whole world is abuzz with the sounds of people talking about George Orwell, whose real name, as you know, was Eric Blair. I myself am an Orwell scholar, having authored three books of Orwellian criticism: "How Orwell Got to Be Orwell," "A Pocketful of Orwell," and "Are You Sick, Orwell?" I've invited Hitch and my dear friend Andrew Sullivan to participate in an Orwell discussion on this very site. Depending on their schedules (mine is pretty open), I intend to have the dialogue flowing within the next six hours to six months. If any readers have comments or questions about Orwell, direct them to me, and we can begin a debate. A preview will occur in Aspen this weekend, when Hitch, Sully and I participate in the third annual Iconoclastic Intellectuals Unafraid to Break With Liberal Orthodoxy convention. The hotel bar scene is sure to be spicy.

Keep the aspidistra flying, boys!

Because of a serious case of intestinal cramping brought on by an extra Saturday-night helping of Roger's rabbit-stuffed quail, I spent much of Sunday on the john, reading the New York Times Magazine in its entirety. My first thought was, well, it's about time that somebody devoted an entire issue of a magazine to New York City, which has been written about far too little in the last year. Then I began to think about the individual articles in the issue, and whether or not I agreed or disagreed with them.

For instance, like Frank Rich, I believe that Manhattan Is the Real America, and I, too, have wondered Who The Heck Is Gifford Miller? Jim Nelson, in his piece, helped answer a question that I have always asked privately, but never dared pose publicly, and I thank him, for now I know how Hipness Moves Block By Block.

However, I must disagree with James Traub, who many of you know as my failed biographer. He thinks he understands Where The School System Went Disastrously Wrong, but he neglects to mention, due to either dearth of space or lack of research, the massive curricular failure that has plagued the New York Public Schools since the mid-1980s. In a world where the works of Alice Walker are taught as equivalent to those of William Shakespeare, where we subscribe to mathematical methods devised by Arabs, and where gay sex is considered acceptable gym activity, no true learning can take place.

I must thank Gerald Mazorati, the greatest rock writer in America, for introducing culturally clueless Times readers to my favorite current band, The White Strokes. I am a huge fan of them all, particularly lead singer Julio Casablancas and drummer Fabio Morroni. Since August, I've been telling readers of this blog to buy their album, This Ain't It. Together, we can push this truly fabulous pop-punk combo over the top.

In general, the Times served up a fine issue, but it definitely would have benefitted from a contribution from me. The editors of the Times have repeatedly shown themselves to quiver like Girl Scouts on a doomed rafting trip when faced with my story ideas, including my strong 10,000-word stand either for or against homosexual race mixing, my unqualified back-page support of Her Majesty's golden jubilee, or my Lucinda Williams profile written from the point of view of an imaginary guitar named Horatio. Their constant rejection and constant fear of me is, quite frankly, an embarrassment to democracy.

They most certainly missed out on a great essay. I lived in New York for eight years, from 1979 to 1987, and I can honestly say that four or five of those years were among the best of my life. Since then, I've owned property in 45 of the 50 states, and in 17 different countries, but I find my thoughts turning most often to New York and also to Portugal, where, by law, beautiful women must give blowjobs to foreign writers. My friends in these other places, and they are numerous, often look at me like I'm a pedophiliac leper when I tell them I lived in New York. But I can only gaze upon them with pity, for I have taken part in the grand human carnival, and they have merely lived out their destinies as pathetic gutter pigs, forever doomed to lick slime out of the trough of empire.

My analysis of President Bush's speech to the nation will appear in this space tomorrow. A large community of like-minded people, who think what I tell them to think, are waiting. Do not fear, friends. I expect the President to make the case for war and soothe our fears of economic collapse, environmental calamity, and more Reese Witherspoon movies. He will do a fine job ignoring the ditherings of the anti-war left, which includes everyone who disagrees with me.

For a while this summer, after the paperback release of my monumental book-length document, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, I was getting a lot of wild sexual come-ons from strangers. What upset them was not the book--a collection of my best pieces of nonfiction reporting from the last four decades--but some rather piquant remarks I'd made to the puerile popular press about my frequent uncontrollable erections. I knew it was a mistake to reply to these readers, but, hell, I was pretty horny, and I wasn't getting much at home. So I had a lot of Internet sex, so much that, in fact, I had to cancel the West Coast leg of my book tour and had to go to Sam's Club and get 100 boxes of extra Kleenex. Man. I was having web-sex with female fans all the time! All their notes made me so horny!

Taking a page from my old teacher, William Gaddis, I said to the women online, "Mmmmmmm. Baby. I want you to come for me so bad." And they did, as far as I know.

One email, though, really lodged in my craw. It was from a Ms. Foxy Widepussy, of Delaware. She said, first of all, that she imagined my "cock" was hard as a "rock," and then said, "the antipodes of my diurnality are so fucking swollen right now. I want you in my ass, so bad." And then she offered this caricature of me and my presumed audience:

"Big-titted women and tight-assed men really want you to fuck them, Pollack. They are ready for you wherever you go on the road. Anytime at all. They want you to thrust your hard member into them, this superior species of people who never read Harper's and The New Yorker."

Actually, those people didn't sound so bad, so I wrote her back. A few days later, I took the train to Wilmington, Delaware. We choloroformed her husband and went to their beach house, where we rode the funky monkey all night long. I forgot all about literature for several days, and have continued to forget about it since.

This changed the way I look at my profession. In college, I read a lot of books by guys who I thought were I lot like me, writers like Pynchon and DeLillo and, yes, William Gaddis. But then in my mid-20s, I struggled through a dreary editorial assistantship at a magazine that starts with N. I took a week off, claiming I had the flu, to read Remembrance of Things Past. About 15 pages in, I started masturbating. It was then I realized that I had to write the kinds of books that I found exciting, not the ones that I thought the intellectual elite might enjoy. I retreated to Mustique, where I began and ended my first novel, The Anatomy of Phoenix, in about 27 days. My audience, I'd realized, was people like me, ripped-out potentates with dick to burn and coke to snort. I could see them riding the subway, except none of them lived in New York. And they'd kick your flaccid ass.

So my literary career was born, and my most recent adventure in Delaware just reconfirmed what I'd learned earlier. Young reader, if you're thinking of becoming a writer and are wondering if you missed some important clue to success, remember what a lesser author than me once said: "The essense of postmodernism is an adolescent fear of getting taken in, an adolescent conviction that all systems are phoney. The theory is compelling, but as a way of life it's a recipe for rage. The child grows enormous but never grows up."

Okey-doke, then. Now I have a life to live, loser.

As you've all probably read by now on the Garden State's website of record, I am at war with New Jersey. It's been a subtle war, a quiet war. The weapons have been, with the exception of that stapler incident, words. But I consider it to have been a war nonetheless, and, as my regular readers know, when I go to war, I go to win.

Some background. In August, Governor James McGreevey named me New Jersey's second-ever Pundit Laureate. It was a position already tinged with disgrace. My predecessor, Mickey Kaus , was forced to resign when it was discovered he didn't live in New Jersey. In fact, he'd never been to New Jersey and had sent one of his many body doubles to his acceptance ceremony.

When McGreevey announced me as Kaus' replacement, he said, in public, "not only has Neal Pollack written two excellent books about our state--Bruce Springsteen: American Sphinx, and Big Pussy: American Brutus--but he also has a house at the Jersey Shore. We welcome him with all our heart. Senator Torricelli, please present Neal Pollack with a big check."

The first month of my Pundit Laureateship went beautifully. I spoke at two libraries, dedicated the Neal Pollack rest area on the Turnpike, and hit it big at the roulette table at the Trump Taj Mahal. Then, on September 18, while speaking to the B'nai Brith of greater Montclair, I said:

"Sure the Jews knew about September 11. They knew, knew, knew, knew, knew. And they did nothing about it. Jews, Jews, Jews. Always knowing. Never doing."

Well, that created a furor. Now Governor McGreevey is calling for my resignation, and for a return of the $50,000. Well, first of all, I already spent the money on a car, and you know the second you roll something off the lot, it loses half its value.

And why should I resign, anyway? Because I said the Jews knew about September 11 in advance and because I've claimed elsewhere that the War on Terror is "a conspiracy hatched by Zionists and international bankers"? Hogwash! I am an artist! This is America! I am entitled to my opinion!

Besides, I have a lot of Jew friends. My parents and sisters are Jewish. I, myself, am Jewish half the year and have attended temple on the High Holidays three of the last five autumns. I do not, as Governor McGreevey claims, "give succor to the enemy." I don't even know what succor is! And I will not, despite the baying of the Jewish media and its lobbyists, resign.

New Jersey. You're stuck with me.

Last Friday evening, my girlfriend, my other girlfriend and I were hanging out in front of a Williamsburg art gallery to celebrate the opening of an installation by a friend for whom I have written several expensive art-book introductions. We were discussing our unease about the upcoming war, and also the rise in poverty and how terrible that is. From time to time, we'd sip our beer or wine, and then once in a while someone would break out a little red plastic bag and we'd blow some uncut Peruvian. It was a very typical night out in Brooklyn until the cops came calling.

Sure, we were guilty of the crime of standing four feet outside of a gallery's door with open bags of coke, along with a small group of other people. So what if we were blaring very loud electroclash music into the night, punctuating our consumption with glorious chants of "WHOOOP! WHOOOP! WHOOOP! WHOOOP!"? It was early evening in a warehouse district, and all the working people had gone home to their sad partyless lives. But these three cops apparently didn't care. They patted us down. They took our driver's licenses. One of them went in the car and got on the radio. They filled out a bunch of forms.

Finally, one of them took me aside.

"You'd better not touch me," I said. "Through my work as a radical journalist, I know many human-rights lawyers."

"Buddy, I don't want to touch you," said the cop. "I want to give you this."

It was a flier, advertising an October 6 National Day Of Action against war in Iraq. "Most of the NYPD secretly believes that President Bush has gone too far," said the cop. "We do not want our government to commit acts of senseless violence in our name."

Obviously, I told him, you've seen my anti-war writings, both in print and on the Internet, and you want me to speak at the rally you're organizing. Well, I said, I'll do it, and I'll even waive my usual $10,000 fee.

"Never heard of you," said the cop. "We're just handing out fliers."

"Oh," I said.

"You mind giving us your girlfriend for the evening?" he said. "We're heroes, and we're lonely."

"Sure," I said. "She needs a real man. Just have her home by dawn."

So instead of having a three-way coke orgy, I went home to read the flier and the Internet links listed on it. The more I read, the more I felt committed to "The Movement." Since 1998, we've shut down the World Bank and the IMF, stopped the 2000 Republican AND Democratic conventions, ended capitalism, and freed Mumia. At least in our minds. The government must understand that it cannot break the will of The Movement. We are out there, by the thousands. We already have Marisa Tomei and Ossie Davis, and now the NYPD is behind us as well. We will not let the US Government wage continual war in our name. Also, we need $10,000 by Thursday, or they won't let us use the stage in Central Park.

For more information, or to help, contact Day Of Action head organizer Andrew Sullivan. The anti-war movement has no greater friend.