Oh I forgot to mention that part. Yes, straying outside the states at all, well, you might get French fries instead of Freedom fries.

Thinking of this topic I have vivid memories of when I could check into a European hotel and within five minutes have the telephone wire enclosure unscrewed and my dial up modem wires spliced in to the phone lines, even when at times it meant taking the bed headboard apart to get to it.

Then it was a matter of typing in the various codes for the modem to dial, whatever it took to get an outside line and etc, typing in the commas so it would pause just right and wait for the dial tones, tweaking it to get the timing right, and so on.

The first time I figured it out it probably took me the whole day, but after a while I could do it within minutes, I'd race myself.

The hotel phone charges were high in some ways, but at least you could make local calls when providers started having numbers worldwide, so then you'd hop on, suck in all the e-mail, and hang up. Then write answers, and hop on again to send.

Ah memories.

Course, in those days we used to DREAM of livin in a corridor. "WI-FI"? Luxury!

"Angel in the House"

Okay four words. Among the words...

The Victorian Poem swept generations up in its ideals of wifely virtue, among which was an absolutely cheerful and supportive demeanor. In other words, when asked "are you happy?" or "please rate your level of happiness with your situation in life" the good Angel would never had answer "it sucks", and not only because that euphemism wasn't invented yet.

Fast foward to the 50s, and while it's not Victorian England anymore, it's also still laced with vestiges of this sort of thinking. That is, if in Douthat's own estimation this was "pre-liberation" times, then almost by definition women were far less likely to complain, which would reflect badly on their husband and their family and would imply that they were doing a lousy job of their role in life which was, among other things, to keep morale up and not complain.

None of this is absolute but there's enough of that effect going on easily to make the small percentage point changes in these polls. In any case it's a huge consideration, which Douthat missed entirely. Based on what I've seen of him so far that would seem to be a speciality of his.

Yes, because there's no civic sense or activists or anything like that in New York City and no one in Washington DC is trying to become famous.

And in little towns in the MidWest everything is like it was in the olden days. Except it never was. Even then.

"They are going to wind up an even tinier minority party than they are now."

I don't think there's any chance of averting that, at this point.

Even David Brooks thinks it will take another few election losses before they even start to wake up, and he's mostly blind as a bat, so if even he can see that...

The days after September 11 forever changed most people's perceptions of NYC as a place populated by people only "out for yourself" and "clawing to the top" and so on.

Garrison Keilor is clearly just dated and out of touch on that score and prefers to traffic in cliche, but anyone who's surprised by that has clearly never listened to his radio show.

Since we seem to be having a three-way, er well you know what I mean, conversation, I might as well just reply once.

Dustball: I don't think New York or any other city was ever only one way. The whole point to me was that after 9/11 people saw that they tend to think in pure, rather silly cliches about New York, because if they didn't then why were they so surprised to see such pulling together, civic responsibility, and pretty much the opposite of what the stereotypes are all about?

Of course it exists, all the hard-charging aspects that the stereotypes are built on, but the whole point is to realize that all the other parts are there too, we're all just humans after all, not really all that different.

Jon Stewart had a take on this that I loved, when George W Bush was in some small town in the South giving a speech and made a point of saying that it was great to be here in the heartland, "where people love their familes!" To which Stewart responded "Yeah, not like here in New York, where we're a bunch of family haters!"

It's cheap stereotypes that kill us more often than not, all people from X culture are uniformly one way and they in turn think the same about culture Y, and on it goes, often with weapons involved.

Oh and Michelle I'm sorry if you misunderstood but I wasn't in any way implying that I ever enjoyed that radio show, whenever I tried to listen I found it one big excercise in the worst kind of cliches. I guess some people like exactly that about it.

Please forgive me, I somehow read your post as "I could never get enough of PHC". I plead reading it while still partly asleep.

Other than that: what you said.