No news here, but this strikes me as one of the great unresolved disputes in pop culture history:

I watched the original Star Wars a few days ago, and noted that on the commentary track George Lucas provides a new version of the development of the Obi-Wan Kenobi character. According to Lucas, he decided at some point in the production that Kenobi had to die part of the way through the movie — over the objections of Alec Guinness, who wanted to keep on working. Nothing remarkable there, except that Guinness very famously gave a totally different version of the story: that Guinness himself talked Lucas into killing off the character because he was bored with reciting "those bloody awful, banal lines." As the late actor told the late Talk magazine in 1999, "I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo."

That's two incompatible versions of the same event. One witness is dead and the other is a fairly energetic reinventor of his own back stories. Which one do you believe? Against my usual habit of not trusting anything George Lucas says, I'm inclined to say he is telling the truer story.

Guinness built up a great reputation as a Star Wars basher over the years, but he didn't start out that way; there's very little in the contemporary record to suggest the kind of contempt for the movie he later showed. The argument-from-self-interest also works against Guinness' version. Actors want to keep acting, as Guinness himself went on to prove: Well into his career as a Star Wars refusenik, he accepted cameo roles in both sequels. Finally, Lucas earned a small believability credit with me by including the original, blissfully non-remastered version of the original movie in the DVD package, which suggests he has given up on his subtle but persistent campaign to convince everybody that the original Star Wars was always called Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.

Whichever version is true, I'm well satisfied that the entire Star Wars project ran out of steam once Kenobi got killed off. They kept making the movies, but from that point I tuned out, only waking up from time to time out of respect for Lando Calrissian, inter-galactic cock-blocker.

Big Sunday founder David T. Levinson reflects on the idiosyncrasies of pop volunteerism, and Ronald Brownstein picks apart John McCain's true views on the U.S. military's future in Iraq. Merrick J. Bob, executive director of the Police Assessment Resource Center, investigates better ways to track racial profiling by LAPD officers, and cartoonist Rob Rogers snarks at Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's problem relationships. Joel Stein finds out that a new citizen's vote is worth $6 and a cookie:

There's an emotional ceremony every month in which 3,500 newly naturalized citizens pledge their loyalty to the United States, and it really feels like they've joined a community of shared values, goals and purpose. Then, as soon as they pass through the gates of the L.A. County fairgrounds and enter the parking lot, they are charged from the right by Republicans and from the left by Democrats, begging them to register to vote. It is a bit like kissing the bride and being told your new father-in-law is a Capulet and your mother-in-law's a Montague and they've each registered you for a Glock.

The editorial board calls for the Supreme Court to let a murder victim's posthumous testimony stand, and wonders how to turn the beleaguered Santa Barbara Plaza project around. The board also whips out its pen to defend taco trucks against a new L.A. County ordinance:

Supervisors may have expected the new law to attract little controversy; after all, it was backed by Eastside restaurateurs and developers, a group with considerably more money and political power than the largely immigrant entrepreneurs who own taco trucks. But it has raised the ire of a far larger group: the thousands of Angelenos who have long gathered at taco trucks, in many cases since childhood, for quick carnitas burritos or mouthwatering cemitas, central Mexican sandwiches filled with avocado, cheese, fried meat and other gut-busting goodness. An Internet-driven movement started by a pair of Highland Park residents has already produced 2,200 signatures on a petition to repeal the law. Sign us up too.

Readers also react to the LAPD's dismissal of all complaints of racial profiling from last year. Leni Fleming writes:

"Los Angeles Police Department officials announced Tuesday that they investigated more than 300 complaints of racial profiling against officers last year and found that none had merit" is, bar none, the most hilarious sentence I have ever read in The Times.

And I'm white!

Though the old jape "I thought he'd died years ago" exactly described my reaction to the death this week of LSD inventor Albert Hofmann, the news was moving nonetheless. First, because the Swiss chemist's death at the age of 102 provides yet more proof — along with the durability of fellow drug icons Timothy Leary (died at age 75) and William S. Burroughs (83) — that winners do use drugs and lead long productive lives. Second, because, as this Times obituary demonstrates, Hofmann was a far groovier figure than I had always thought based on my vague knowledge of his accidental discovery and the famous "bicycle day."

Read through the description of Hofmann's first full-scale trip, during which he believed at first that he was dying but went on to enjoy a pleasant experience, and you'll get a sense of what I've always thought was a great falsehood about acid: that there is some bright-line difference between a "good" and "bad" trip. I've never understood why you'd even want an acid trip without moments of agonizing panic and bottomless despair; it would be like food without seasonings. I'm not suggesting you eat the brown acid; in fact I'm not suggesting you eat any acid at all. But the need to go into the thing with an open mind and some commitment to remain analytical always seemed to me what made LSD so cool: It cuts through such meaningless distinctions as Hoosier/Hawkeye or Catholic/Protestant to reveal the most important distinction of all: curious/incurious.

Hofmann was also more credulous about the drug's spiritual properties than I had thought, putting him (whether he would have agreed or not) more in line with the Leary school of consciousness-expansion than the Ken Kesey school of fun and games.

The third school of thought, of course, is Joe Friday's, in which all trips are bad, and no discussion of LSD would be complete without a viewing of Dragnet's "Blue Boy" episode, which was to LSD prohibition what Exodus was to support for Israel. I hover among all three points: I never saw the point of taking all the fun out of a recreational drug with gloopy pseudo-religiosity, and there comes a point where the value in both fun and spiritual discovery starts to diminish in relation to the real or imagined dain bramage you're inflicting on yourself. Hofmann, like virtually everybody who takes acid, eventually retired from tripping. But his invention made the world a more interesting place. Good luck and happy trips to Rick Doblin and others who continue the research.

President Bush has done it again -- commemorate the genocide of around 1.5 million Armenians nearly a century ago without offending the Turkish government by avoiding the word "genocide." Click here to read Bush's complete statement; here's an excerpt:

On this day of remembrance, we honor the memory of the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, the mass killings and forced exile of as many as 1.5 million Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire. I join the Armenian community in America and around the world in commemorating this tragedy and mourning the loss of so many innocent lives.

Bush later implores Turkey and Armenia to normalize relations and praises those who "support joint efforts for an open examination of the past in search of a shared understanding of these tragic events." But an overwhelming consensus of historians already has a clear understanding of what went on between 1915 and 1917: that the mass deportations, forced marches with no food or water and senseless massacres were nothing more than a genocide of Armenians by the Young Turk government of the moribund Ottoman Empire. Bush's call for an "open examination" is nothing more than a nod to Turkey's rigid (and incorrect) position that whether the events of 1915 - 1917 constitute a genocide is an open question. It isn't.

Matt Welch, a former editor at The Times' opinion pages, wrote about Bush's mealy-mouthed genocide statements last year; click here to read his Op-Ed.

Maybe I'm more broken up than most about the death of Charlton Heston, but it seems to me one of Heston's most important achievements has been missing from the appreciations of his half-century-long career: At an age when most men are sliding into paunch and griping about their bad backs, in an era when barrel-chested Victor Mature types had not yet yielded the stage to more sinewy men, Heston brought the hardbody to America.

This is not to say Heston was the only actor of his time who bothered to stay in shape, but the references in our obit to his "lean-hipped" look and nude scene in Planet of the Apes raise an important question: How many 45-year-olds, then or now, would be comfortable showing that much skin on a giant movie screen? More important, how many would look that good? If you check out the other top box office performers of 1968, you'll find even the svelte Steve McQueen and John Cassavetes letting none of it all hang out, and the rest of the list is filled with lumpish leading men like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Say what you will about Heston's unpopular politics or (allegedly) wooden acting; but you could do your laundry on those abs.

Nor is this just a tour of my own homoerotic inner mind. I'd like to stand up for the trilogy of dystopian science fiction of which Planet of the Apes is merely the first part. The New York Times doesn't even mention Soylent Green or The Omega Man in its obit, and our own coverage is pretty dismissive of both. (Planet of the Apes is now canonical enough that highbrows belittle it at their own risk.) I'd argue that both those movies are touched by greatness and live on for, if nothing else, the insights they provide into the culture of their time.

The Omega Man — which opens with Heston tooling around an empty, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles (the city where the world was meant to end, damn it!) and, in a brilliant touch, watching, over and over again, the only movie still playing, Woodstock — is as full an examination of the relationship between the establishment and the counterculture as any film of its time. It's an olive branch from Heston to the hippies, with the hero repulsed, fascinated by and ultimately in love with the groovy kids he recognizes as the only future for mankind. Who else but Heston could have been at the same time hip enough and square enough to share a hot makeout scene with the late Rosalind Cash, and have that actually mean something? Who else could have rocked that ascot-and-Sgt.-Pepper-jacket look? That Anthony Zerbe's black-robed zombie inquisitor puts a face of intolerance and anti-rationality onto the rhetoric of progress ("Forget the old ways, brother, all the old hatreds") just shows that even when Heston put a hand out to the flower children, he did so recognizing that they shared a common enemy in unreason.

Both pages recall the death of Martin Luther King Jr., 40 years ago today. The editorial board imagines the U.S. if King had lived:

We don't need to canonize King to appreciate his many accomplishments, nor declare time-wasting moratoriums to mourn his passing. He was a complex man with messy personal affairs who unified people of all races on the issue of civil rights, while dividing many with his controversial stance on the Vietnam War.... In the final years of his short life, King became nearly as concerned about the war and the plight of the poor as he was about racial discrimination...if King were alive today (he would have turned 79 on Jan. 15), the fight against poverty would probably be higher on the national political agenda and the opposition to the Iraq war more focused.

Goergetown's Michael Eric Dyson examines King's increasingly angry stance after 1965:

King's skepticism and anger were often muted when he spoke to white America, but they routinely resonated in black sanctuaries and meeting halls across the land. Nothing highlights that split -- or white America's ignorance of it and the prophetic black church King inspired -- more than recalling King's post-1965 odyssey, as he grappled bravely with poverty, war and entrenched racism. That is the King who emerges as we recall the meaning of his death.

And the Op-Ed page features photography of the Lorraine Motel, where King was killed, by Steve Schapiro.

Columnist Joel Stein has learned one thing from the John McCain campaign -- that jokes about the elderly are just fine. And the editorial board praises the House for passing a generous foreign aid package for AIDS patients around the world, and reflects on the Bush Administration's declassified torture memos.

Readers discuss illegal immigration on the letters page. L.A.'s Frank Galvan says, "This article helped put a human face on a population that is too often only considered by many to be just a problem...." But Van Nuys' Phil Hyman retorts, "Pardon me if I"m not breaking down in tears.... Who made them decide to come here illegally in the first place?"

*Photo Steve Schapiro, courtesy Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Willis G. Regier surveys Aesop translations:

Nine translators dominated Aesop in English over the past 500 years, and new ones are vying for attention. What do the translations show? Most obviously, some Aesops have more Aesop, much more, than others. Some have been much more reprinted, and more popular. And some change the fables: In some editions a lion outwits three bulls, in others four. Animals are altered: A weasel in one translation is a cat in another, toads become frogs, crows become ravens, a bear becomes a tiger, a lion becomes a leopard, and so on.

There follows a colorful tale of Royalists fighting Roundheads, Anglicans lecturing souls into heav'n, and the winner of the best-overall-translation wreath: Laura Gibbs' Aesop's Fables. Yet it still leaves my lifelong Aesop question unanswered...

What the hell is the fable "The Man and the Satyr" about?

Here, try reading another version of the tale. Or try this one and see if you can figure out what the moral could possibly be.

Is the moral that satyrs are too dumb to understand rudimentary heat transfer?

Or is the idea that the satyr is right, and it is wrong to produce breath that is warmer than frost but colder than porridge? That seems to be the point of this version, which includes a moral:

The man who talks for both sides is not to be trusted by either.

So, I give up: Why is a man who maintains a body temperature of 98.6 fahrenheit more or less trustworthy than any other man who maintains the same body temperature? Do you need to know the temperature of satyr breath to understand this one?

Contributing editor Michael Kinsley asks a question few have dared -- how long does it take Hillary Clinton to do her make-up? He writes:

Every day for almost two years, the candidates campaign. The average day is probably 15 to 20 hours. The average amount of sleep could be four hours. Yet, every day, the male candidates can sleep an extra precious half-hour or more -- or spend the time cramming for the day -- simply because our culture doesn't impose the same rules on them about their appearance.

And these really are rules. Sure, there are women who take no more trouble about their appearance than most men do, and men who take more than the typical woman. But a middle-aged woman who is the first of her sex to make a serious run for the presidency is not going to be a pioneer in indifference to looks. One revolution at a time. She has got to look put together, all day, every day.

Columnist Rosa Brooks warns her fellow mothers against aggressively marketed, often orphaned Disney princesses. The Center for European Policy Analysis' A. Wess Mitchell notes the efforts of NATO's newer members in Afghanistan. And Harold Hall, wrongly convicted and imprisoned for 20 years, says his case shows why the state should reconsider execution.

The editorial board highlights the need for transparency in the LAPD, examines Mexico's raging drug war as it hits a small border town, and argues for habeas rights for two U.S. citizens held in Iraq.

Readers consider California's law against driving while cell-phoning. Valencia's Lisa Stevenson says:

We have always been eating, drinking coffee, reading road maps, changing radio stations, applying makeup, shaving, talking to passengers, disciplining children, groping for dropped gum, staring at sign-twirlers and beating out drum solos on our steering wheels while driving. Yet there are no laws banning these activities.

Contributing editor Ian Buruma says Tibetan culture may not survive China's modernization, except among the diaspora:

The Chinese have exported their version of modern development to Tibet, not just in terms of architecture and infrastructure but people, wave after wave of them: businessmen from Sichuan, prostitutes from Hunan, technocrats from Beijing, party officials from Shanghai, shopkeepers from Yunnan. The majority of the people living today in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, are no longer Tibetan. Most people in rural areas are Tibetan, but their way of life is not likely to survive Chinese modernization any more than the ways of the Apaches did in the United States.

George Washington University's Jonathan Turley wonders why you can be competent to stand trial, but unfit to represent yourself. And Hope College's David G. Myers says primal urges are to blame for March madness.

The editorial board warns taxpayers that they'll face new risks as Fannie and Freddie buy more mortgages thanks to a rule change. The board also wants to know where scientific exhibits got their cadavers, and thinks the Supreme Court erred by not giving Jose Medellin, a Mexican national on death row in Texas, another day in court.

Readers discuss discussing race. Torrance's David Nelson says, "The article begins: 'How do we start a national dialogue on race?' A better question is: Why should we?"

On the heels of the Iraq war's fifth anniversary comes another somewhat arbitrary but far more grim milestone: 4,000 American soldiers have now died in the conflict, though casualties have been low so far this year. The editorial board didn't remark on the death toll when it hit 2,000 (in October 2005) or 3,000 (at the end of 2006), even though those points coincided with some other big events -- the ratification of a draft constitution and Saddam Hussein's execution.

The board did write when the death toll hit 1,000, highlighting the randomness of marking a number of dead (sorry, no link):

Six U.S. soldiers were killed, two Italian aid workers were kidnapped and warplanes bombed a Sunni enclave in Fallouja, a city mostly off-limits to coalition troops. It was just another day in the war Tuesday, except for the numbers. By this morning, Iraq time, the Associated Press count of casualties stated that 1,000 U.S. troops had been killed in Iraq, aside from more than 100 other coalition soldiers and thousands of Iraqi noncombatants. And many thousands more have been wounded.

It is an obvious point at which to ask: To what end are U.S. personnel continuing to die? What is it that commanders should tell their troops as they head into lethal streets?

The board noted another, less round number in January...

Top of the Ticket reports that former ambassador Roland Arnall has died at UCLA Medical Center.

Arnall's Ameriquest was a leader in subprime mortgage loans and was variously depicted as a predator on low-to-moderate income home buyers and the deliverer of the American dream to people otherwise priced out of the housing market. In 2006 the company paid millions of dollars to resolve investigations by 49 states, including California.

Arnall was a major donor to Republican candidates and causes, including President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But he and his wife, Dawn, also gave lavishly to Democrats, including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, and City Council members Bernard Parks, Wendy Greuel, Jose Huizar and Jack Weiss.

Villaraigosa borrowed the Ameriquest jet in November 2005 to fly to the Detroit funeral of civil rights icon Rosa Parks. He was heavily criticized for his ride, and ultimately paid $438 to cover the cost of the flight. Critics persisted, saying the cost was much higher than the equivalent price of a round-trip commercial air ticket.

Arnall helped found the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

He became U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands two years ago.

It was almost like old times as Max Boot brought in our most popular story of the week, but it was Hillary Clinton who had readers turning out again and again. Even the downfall of Eliot Spitzer barely registered as Opinion readers went for Hillary again and again:

1. Fallon didn't get it, by Max Boot
2. Why we still need Clinton, by Meghan Daum
3. Want a man, or a worm? by David P. Barash
4. Our three-decade recession, by Robert Costanza 
5. Where's your outrage, Hillary? by Rosa Brooks
6. It's your call, Hillary, by Rosa Brooks
7. Fond memories of the Dungeon, by Joel Stein
8. Go away? Why should she? by Leslie Bennetts   
9. Threat in the Andes, by William Ratliff
10. Forget that day in court, by Peggy Garrity

Columnist Joel Stein asks the question on everyone's mind -- what exactly do you get for $1,000 an hour?

I called a high-end escort in Las Vegas who charges $500 an hour -- but gives, according to her website, a discount to educators and political activists. The escort , it turns out, is a huge fan of Spitzer, particularly his prosecution of Wall Street crimes when he was New York's attorney general. "I liked him. And I don't like many politicians. I have nothing but respect for him," she said. "It's a shame politicians can't have sex like everyone else."

The roughly $1,000 an hour that Spitzer paid for time with "Kristen," she told me, was not, as I assumed, to guarantee secrecy.... And the exorbitant rate wasn't a premium for weird or talented sex.

Former soldier and military historian Ed Ruggero notes near the 40th anniversary of the My Lai massacre that war is never simple. And the Center for American Progress' Lawrence J. Korb and Sean E. Duggan argue that if Gen. David H. Petraeus testifies alone, we'll never get the full picture of Iraq.

The editorial board examines new mortgage regulations proposed by the Bush administration, and says that after 136 years, it's really about time for a new mining law. Finally, the board urges the state to do away with another historical relic -- loyalty oaths.

On the letters page, readers react to Max Boot's take on Adm. William Fallon. Escondido's Blaise Jackson cracks, "So armchair-admiral Boot crawls out from under his ideologue rock to toss dirt at the departing Fallon; what a surprise."

I spent too many years working for trade papers and magazines to take any cheap shots at the bankruptcy of Ziff Davis — one of many companies that, for a fleeting moment in the nineties, almost made trade papers cool.

With a storied history dating back to the 1920s, the trade-and-hobby-pub conglomerate found a niche in tech mags in the 1980s, became Johnny-on-the-spot during the internet boom of the 1990s, and apparently has been riding the comet back down in this decade. But those were heady days in that post-Wired, Wolff New Media-crazed era when everybody (or more precisely, nobody) was itching to get the latest issue of Inside the Fast Red eCompany Standard 2.0 Now, when it seemed as if the dreary drudgework of trade journalism could be webified into something brighter and shinier than it really was. Could there actually be sexiness in the meat and potatoes of business?

In my crated-up junk I may still have a VHS tape of a profile of me (as a web personality!) on ZDTV back in that golden age. That I was of interest to a TV show at all should have been the tipoff that something was seriously wrong. Somewhere in the course of that interview, I think you can detect the exact second when the effort to introduce some degree of hipness into what was essentially a dull business peaked and began to fall. It's all been downhill from there, and in fact the one well-lost casualty of the nineties was the delusion that cool-factor had much monetary value. But Z D gave it the college try, and has since been trying to stay afloat in the less glamorous but more honorable business of providing useful information. In honor of Chemical Marketing Reporter, Securities Industry Daily and all those other then-unreadable and now-defunct birdcage liners that kept me off the dole, I salute Ziff Davis.

National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn examines the late William F. Buckley's legacy:

A year after graduating from college, Buckley pioneered the depiction of American liberals as a smug, self-satisfied elite in his famous 1951 book, "God and Man at Yale." At National Review, he brought on a passel of former Trotskyites turned conservatives, such as Willi Schlamm and James Burnham, who churned out essays attacking the news media and universities as being filled with doctrinaire liberals. Sound familiar?

Ever since, conservatives -- whether it's Ann Coulter or Dinesh D'Souza -- have continuously denounced traitorous liberal elites. But they are bargain-basement Buckleys.

The editorial board has its take:

It was an irony of Buckley's career that after he boosted so many Republican presidents, they invariably disappointed him. Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and imposed wage and price controls; Ronald Reagan left office with the Department of Education intact; George W. Bush vastly increased Medicare benefits and plunged the country into a war that Buckley turned against long before that became an acceptable conservative position.

Elsewhere on the editorial page, the board says the Democratic candidates are wrong to vilify NAFTA, and asks U.N. member states, especially Russia and China, to pledge more money to fight drug resistant tuberculosis.

On the Op-Ed page, columnist Rosa Brooks looks at the new revision of the Army Field Manual. U.C. San Diego's James H. Fowler says the "Colbert bump" is real. And columnist Patt Morrison explains how lawmakers, activists, and backfiring corporate gluttony saved the California redwoods.

Readers discuss the editorial board's claim that Congress should ignore the issue of telecom immunity. Laguna Niguel's Richard Brock says, "The Times misses the crucial issue animating the retroactive-immunity-for-telecoms debate: whether we are a nation of laws in times of peace and equally a nation of laws in times of war."

More than a few years ago, I filled a chair at a swanky dinner for William F. Buckley.

I was a young student from farm country in Ohio, a state where, as Mark Twain said of Cincinnati in particular, "Everything that happens comes there 10 years later than anywhere else." So the sartorially resplendent Mr. Buckley was a novelty and a wonder to my eyes, down to footgear I'd never seen before — those gentleman's embroidered velvet slippers you see advertised in "The New Yorker." For all I can remember, they had dollar signs sittched onto them in gold bullion thread.

Toward the end of the dinner, he rose to speak. His language was just as highly ornamented as his slippers, with its curlicues of vocabulary and metaphor, and, I listened to him transfixed as I mechanically ate my dessert — a slice of cake. My great-grandfather ate cake in a curious fashion that I had imitated from childhood, eating the cake part first and leaving the frosting for last, standing on the plate like the ruins of a chocolate fudge fort.

In our family this is perfectly normal, but at some point during his peroration, Buckley glanced down the table and saw my odd gateau fortifications. He paused, stared, arched one renowned eyebrow, lifted one thin Brahmin nostril into the slightest quiver — and resumed his remarks at the precise syllable where had left off.

Mortified, I hurriedly and furtively cleaned my plate. Buckley went to Yale but that evening, I was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club.

KUSC ran a richest-classical-composer feature a few days ago, which drew its top-10 list from a 2005 survey by a U.K. radio station. It's unlikely the numbers — which were apparently calculated in adjusted currencies — have changed much since then, so here's the list:

1. George Gershwin
2. Johann Strauss II
3. Giuseppe Verdi
4. Gioachino Rossini
5. George Frideric Handel
6. Joseph Haydn
7. Sergei Rachmaninoff
8. Giacomo Puccini
9. Niccolò Paganini
10. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 

Why is this interesting (to me at any rate)? Because longhair music is pretty much universally recognized as an art form that can't compete in an open market and must be supported through royal or (these days) public patronage. Yet this list is remarkable for the lack of patronage its members enjoyed. All but two of the composers on the list date to the industrial revolution or afterward, and the two who came earlier than that — Haydn and Handel — did plenty of lucrative for-profit work in Britain, which boasted the most liberal economy in Europe. Verdi, Rossini and Puccini were all piece-work producers who were less interested in pleasing the royal ear than in filling up the house with paying customers. Paganini and "Waltz King" Strauss were expert self-promoters and brand builders, Rachmaninoff made much of his fortune on recordings and performances, and Gershwin made it to the top of the list strictly by producing music for a large popular audience. I'm not sure he ever got a dime of public support.

By comparison, Richard Wagner, another 19th-century rock star with a long list of patrons and supporters including a king who built the composer his own mansion and theme-park/mini-city, didn't make the list. That's a special irony given how massively popular Wagner was and still is, not just in opera houses but throughout the popular culture.

You could counter that money earned is no indication of musical achievement, and that wastrels like Wolfgang Mozart and Franz Schubert, or humble workers like J.S. Bach, would top a list of actual composing value. True enough, but hardship and poverty are the default positions of human existence. It's success that's the unusual thing, and the numbers here indicate success becomes a little more likely in a profit-centered environment. Interestingly, Gershwin and Rachmaninoff, who both died before the middle of the 20th century, are the most recent names on the list. Audience indifference has since encouraged classical composers to avoid the uncertainty of the marketplace; but maybe all those composers with academic sits would have been better off trying to make a bigger buck. Maybe classical music needs more market discipline, not less.

The Pope of the New Novel is dead.

Or, let me rephrase that: The body of Alain Robbe-Grillet is room temperature though seemingly cooler to the touch, with slack surface areas along its longitude and discolorations in transverse patterns. The anterior section is a faded beige while the dorsal area and extremeties show evidence of settlement.

Dullest writer of the twentieth century? Visionary genius of the post-religious age? Cinematic huckster? Fearless explorer of the post-rational? I'd say all of the above. The author of, among others, The Erasers, The Voyeur and La Jalousie, and the screenwriter of the mother of all art-house puzzlers Last Year At Marienbad was 85 years old. If you're going to give Robbe-Grillet a shot, I'd suggest any of the above, although my favorite is the short novel In the Labyrinth. I suspect with his passing we are now out of literary lions in winter, those people like Norman Mailer who could still pass as enfants terribles even in their ninth decades.

Dennis Dutton has a useful collection of obits. Le Monde calls him of all the great postwar writers "undoubtedly the best-known abroad and the least-liked in France." A very extensive piece in The Telegraph recounts the following telling anecdote:

In 1961 he had a narrow escape when the aeroplane in which he was travelling from Paris to Tokyo crashed on take-off after a stop at Hamburg airport. Robbe-Grillet dictated his account to a journalist, who found (as so many of the novelist's readers were to find) his version of events objective, but lacking in drama.

This soon changed to a complaint that Robbe-Grillet's version was described in clichéd journalese. His protestations that the journalist was responsible for these infelicities were ignored, though Umberto Eco rushed to his defence.

Whatever you think of his stuff (and the chances are extremely high that, whoever you are, you'll hate it), you can learn more about writing no-loaded-language descriptions from Robbe-Grillet than from any other recently deceased author.

With the news that Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton, the late alleged murderer of two police officers and three city officials in Kirkwood, Missori, was a well known city-council gadfly, we set the wayback machine to 2003, for a Los Angeles Times story by Hugo Martin, explaining some of the tensions involved in giving broad leeway to public blowhards. Here it is in full print-spec glory:

Los Angeles Times
Wednesday September 24, 2003

THE STATE
COLUMN ONE
Freedom's Test, or Just a Pest?
* Gadflies deemed out of order are arrested or ejected from some public meetings. The 1st Amendment and decorum are at odds.

Home Edition, Main News, Page A-1
Metro Desk
53 inches; 1834 words
Type of Material: Column

By Hugo Martin, Times Staff Writer

After greeting the San Bernardino County supervisors with a mock Nazi salute, Jeff Wright, a homeless Air Force veteran, stepped to the public microphone to complain about being arrested at a regional transportation meeting a few months earlier.

Board Chairman Dennis Hansberger told him to stay on the topic under discussion, which was the salaries of county attorneys. Wright then threatened to seal the supervisor's mouth with duct tape, which he had brought with him.

Hansberger responded by ordering sheriff's deputies to eject Wright, who was led out of the building in handcuffs, screaming about police brutality.

It was nothing new -- for Wright or for the board of supervisors.

The March incident was among the more than 100 arrests or ejections deputies have carried out at meetings of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors since 1989, according to an unofficial tally by one local activist.

Although law enforcement officials say they cannot confirm the exact number, they put the tally in the dozens.

In 2000, reports of those arrests earned the Board of Supervisors the "Black Hole" award, a dubious distinction given by the California First Amendment Coalition to public agencies and officials that the group says show disregard for open government and 1st Amendment rights.

In the past year, the pace of arrests and removals at San Bernardino County supervisors' meetings has increased to about one per month, with most speakers being removed for failing to stick to the agenda and then refusing to surrender the lectern.

If you enjoyed John Mueller's recent Rambo charticle, which tracked the pneumatic commando's varied career along a rising death-per-minute axis, you were not alone. The United Kingdom tabloid The Sun got enough of a kick out of the Ohio State professor's math that it decided the most sincere form of flattery would be to make up some fake quotes and attribute them to Mueller. According to The Sun's story on the Rambo chart:

Mr Mueller said the movie, out next month, showed “the most depraved level of man’s inhumanity to man”.

Mueller has a different story. In an email to us, he states, "I just want to say that I never made the statement quoted — to the Sun or to anybody else." In addition to being concerned that the invented quote might allow an inference that he was reviewing the film rather than subjecting it to rigorous scientific testing, Mueller says he's troubled because "the words put in my mouth are so prissy and sanctimonious they make my skin crawl."

In case there's any doubt, Mueller adds, "I  hope I am not overly naive about the journalistic standards of the British tabloids... I have sometimes been misquoted in other papers — but in those the reporter at least actually  talked to me and was clearly TRYING to get it right. Total fabrication is new to me..."

Original charticle here.

Christopher Hitchens remembers Fleet Street in all its squalor here.

Robert Burns laments man's inhumanity to man (a phrase I always thought was invented by Mad magazine) here.

At ITWorld, Josh Fruhlinger, the award-winning Comics Curmudgeon (and once an L.A. Times contributor whose article now exists only in fragments in our pages but is still viewable in its entirety here), takes a jaunt through generic-domain-name history to discover a saga of defunct companies, foiled business schemes and web squatters. Sample:

eat.com: If music.com had real geek cred in its earliest incarnation, a cursory look at the 1996 version of eat.com might lead you to believe that it was a similar outpost on the new frontier of the World Wide Web. "Mama's Dining Room" is the page's name, and the text -- charmingly unformatted on a white background on a hideous gray background, apparently unedited by anyone professional, offering a variety of tasty Italian meals. Then you get to the verbiage at the bottom of the page: "Mama's niece Ana, the lawyer, wrote this next part: Copyright 1996 Lipton, Inc. All rights reserved. Ragú, Chicken Tonight, and Pizza Quick are registered trademarks of Lipton, Inc." Yes, eat.com was one of the world's first astroturfing sites! The current iteration of the site is a much more straightforward homepage for the Ragú brand, now owned, like the other Lipton brands promoted by the entirely fictional "Mama", by Anglo-Dutch megacorporation Unilever.

The saddest part is that the outdated nineties aesthetic on display at these old, archive.org-preserved versions still looks cool and hip and now to me. Whole article.

Messenger probe takes some closeup pics of Mercury, and proves that having an atmosphere and a magnetic field isn't everything: The first planet looks as inert and uninviting as the moon. Dig the photos from JPL and Johns Hopkins.

The half-life of Ron Paul's racist newsletters, a story that has gained almost as little traction as the Paul campaign itself, gets a new wrinkle as Reason's Julian Sanchez and Dave Weigel name the infamous Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. as the pigment- and wrist-strength-obsessed ghostwriter. That was my guess when the identity of Mr. or Madame X became an issue, and the authors have got a host of fellow travelers stating that it was indeed Liberty Lew.

As with so many things that Everybody knows, there's always the possibility that this one is not true. Rockwell himself has denied the charge in other media and refused to comment to Sanchez and Weigel. One commenter says Reason is exaggerating Rockwell's role in order to spare Paul himself.

That doesn't seem to be supported by the article, and S&W surely understand that the negligence defense does nothing to get Paul off the hook. To use the reductio ad absurdum libertarians are said to enjoy, suppose Paul actually became president: Presidential administrations are constantly acting on issues bound up in race. Would any person be willing to give the benefit of the doubt when a Paul appointee to the Justice Department or the Federal Election Commission makes even a valid argument against some race-based policy or dismisses claims about disenfranchising black voters? (That is, in the unlikely event a Paul Administration had an FEC at all.) Nevertheless, the piece allows the inference that the man who would save "the blacks" from unfair drug laws is guilty mainly of sins of omission:

The tenor of Paul's newsletters changed over the years. The ones published between Paul's return to private life after three full terms in congress (1985) and his Libertarian presidential bid (1988) notably lack inflammatory racial or anti-gay comments. The letters published between Paul's first run for president and his return to Congress in 1996 are another story—replete with claims that Martin Luther King "seduced underage girls and boys," that black protesters should gather "at a food stamp bureau or a crack house" rather than the Statue of Liberty, and that AIDS sufferers "enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."

With more interesting ancient history about the Rothbard-Rockwell alliance and their libertarian version of the Southern Strategy. As with most libertarian movement history, the back story is an Illiad of breaks-with, fallings-out, mutual excommunications and hurt feelings, but the specific case is pretty straightforward. Whole article.

Related: Rockwell always feels like somebody's watching him and he's got no privacy.

For an editorial I'm working on I've been learning about the process by which the MTA auctions off its retired buses (don't ask, just be glad you're not me).  My journey of spiritual discovery brought me down to a facility in Long Beach where Ken Porter Auctions at 10:00 am tomorrow will get rid of 55 former Metro buses, plus some non-running, no-provenance relics like the one pictured to the right. The MTA auctions off old buses once or twice every year, and according to the auction company there's a pretty brisk business in such liquidations for various municipalities. I was really struck by this plug-ugly vehicle because its interior is in pretty good shape and it seems like a steal for anybody in the set design or construction business. Isn't there a constant demand for vintage stuff like this in period films? For the prices we're talking about (inside dope is that most or all of tomorrow's inventory will be bought by scrap dealers), it would even be worth it for some high school class to buy this baby, strip off one side and use it as the set to do a Rosa Parks school play.

For that matter, who wouldn't want to buy one of the MTA's own, more recent, orange-and-white diesel gems? (See more details at the Ken Porter site.) My pal at Ken Porter Auctions tells me 44 of these babies have full engines and transmissions and could, in theory, still run. Won't they need a dozen or so buses to trash whenever they get around to making the next Die Hard picture? You could pick up a bunch now and sell them to Fox for a tidy profit! Or just buy a running vehicle, get your bus license, do some smog work and put in a port-a-john, and you've got the ideal traveling home.

Anyway, if you're thinking big or just want to keep me company, show up at 10 tomorrow morning (Wednesday) at 970 W. Chester Pl. Long Beach Ca 90813.

The editorial board says Garden Grove's Felix Kha should get his weed back:

The California Court of Appeal has upheld a lower court decision ordering the police to give back the marijuana seized from a driver during a routine traffic stop. This is likely to generate a wave of "Only in California" jokes, but just because it's wacky doesn't mean it's wrong.

In 2005, Garden Grove police officers stopped Felix Kha for failing to yield at a red light. Kha consented to a search of his car, and police found one-third of an ounce of marijuana that Kha explained was for medicinal purposes. Orange County prosecutors dismissed drug charges against him after contacting his doctor, and Kha sought the return of his property. The police refused, saying that returning the drug would violate federal laws against marijuana distribution and possession....

Can a city invoke federal law to justify its recalcitrance in complying with state law? This is where things could have gotten sticky. But the court correctly found that in this case federal law did not take precedence over California law.

The board says Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is still a threat, even if voters said no to his reforms. And the board addresses the FCC's claim that easing the cross-ownership ban won't curtail diversity.

LAPD officer and author Will Beall writes an ode to late daredevil Evel Knievel, and columnist Jonah Goldberg notes Mitt Romney's JFK moment. Author Karen Dawn says seals and people can get along in La Jolla, and U.C. Santa  Barbara senior research fellow Nathaniel Frank argues that we no longer need "don't ask, don't tell."

Congress passes a bill and the president signs it, but reserves the right not to enforce parts of it that he considers unconstitutional.

Obviously a reference to the imperious George W. Bush, who is notorious for hedging his approval of legislation with “signing statements” like the one he attached to the 2005 McCain Amendment outlawing torture of suspected terrorists.

Actually, the president in this case was Bill Clinton. 

After the death of former Rep. Henry Hyde, Declan McCullagh noted on his  CNET blog that, in addition to pushing for removal from office and leading the charge against taxpayer-subsidized abortions, Hyde was the author of an amendment to the 1996 telecommunications law that made it a felony  to distribute information over the Internet relating to obtaining an abortion. In a signing statement, Clinton said "I...object to the provision in the Act concerning the transmittal of abortion-related speech and information." He noted further that  the Justice Department had advised him "that this and related abortion provisions in current law are unconstitutional and will not be enforced because they violate the First Amendment."

McCullagh notes that the Justice Department under Bush also has declined to enforce the Hyde amendment, a posture unlikely to bring criticism from those who think Bush put himself “above the law” with his signing statements.

The editorial board continues its "A Warming World" series with a piece on energy efficiency:

Energy efficiency is the fastest, safest and cheapest method currently available for cutting carbon emissions. It's also one of the least understood, because it involves a lot more than adding insulation to buildings or installing power-sipping air conditioners. To make really hefty efficiency gains, the U.S. must follow California's lead in restructuring incentives for utilities, and regulatory agencies should do much more to encourage important innovations such as cogeneration plants.

The University of Nebraska's Eric Berger notes that states defend lethal injection procedures, even if they know it causes excruciating pain. Columnist Gregory Rodriguez goes to Wilmington Middle School to see how students are improving their vocabulary during P.E. And the Woodrow Wilson Center's Aaron David Miller says the Annapolis Middle East summit is just the first step to peace.

Readers react to Jonah Goldberg's column saying Ron Paul isn't scary. Pittsburgh's Kris Sanders disagrees: "Wouldn't any candidate who supported the freedom to kill the innocent be truly scary?"

George Washington Law School's Jonathan Turley wonders how to punish a cruel cyber bully:

Megan was contacted on MySpace by a boy named Josh Evans.... Josh went into detail about his own difficult life and immediately struck a chord with Megan. For six weeks they corresponded. Then, when her infatuation was at its peak, Megan received a well-planned, well-timed blow. Josh suddenly told her, "I don't know if I want to be friends with you any longer because I heard you're not a very nice friend".... However, according to her father, the last message from Josh was the worst: "Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a s----y rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you."

Megan fell apart. She went to her room, tied a cloth belt around a support beam in her closet and hanged herself.

Perhaps the only shock that could rival Megan's death was the news (given to her parents by a neighbor) that Josh had never existed -- he had been created by adults who lived nearby.

"Shock Doctrine" author Naomi Klein explains how global economic jolts push people out of the picture. And Milton Viorst writes in from Beirut to say that U.S. policy could push Lebanon into another civil war.

The editorial board asks Wal-Mart why it pursued a lawsuit against a severely disabled former employee for a relatively small sum. The board also advocates a shift in LAPD schedules from a three-day to a four-day work week. Finally the board remembers a time before Arnold Schwarzenegger set the fundraising record, when he promised to spend his own cash and avoid special interests.

Rick Perlstein did not much care for my column of yesterday criticizing people like him and Naomi Klein for bemoaning the existence of private, supplemental fire protection. He brings up some interesting viewpoints worth further discussion.

First, a refresher on my Perlstein citation:

You would think that the cheap availability of potent fire retardant, and the creation of supplementary firefighting capability -- with costs borne entirely by the homeowners who choose to live in fire zones, instead of everyday taxpayers -- would be a cause for at least mild enthusiasm. Instead, it was greeted with howls of class warfare.

Liberal journalist/historian Rick Perlstein called it "a sickening indication about how the conservative mania for privatization is beginning to create two Americas: One that is protected from fires, and one that is not." (Never mind that no one within shouting distance of power or influence is calling for the privatization of fire departments.)

Now, a sampling from Perlstein's counter-argument, which comes under the headline "Solidarity in Flames":

Libertarian Matt Welch doesn't get it. He really doesn't get it. [...]

In so doing, he reveals how far down conservative ideology has fallen in grasping the most basic facts of collective security. In case Welch hasn't noticed, fires spread. Laying down fire-proof rings around islands of individual private properties does not stop fires from spreading; they'll just go around the island. Now, if every house was provided with Phos-Check (sic), the fires would not be able to spread. Everyone (and not just those with an extra $995 lying around, which is not "paltry" to someone living paycheck to paycheck) benefits. There would be no wildfire.

Before getting to the second half of Perlstein's complaint, I'll jump in and make a few relevant points:
1) Yes indeed, fires do spread (pretty rich for an east coaster to give a SoCal native a lecture on the local ecology, BTW), but the majority of homes that burn do so because of stray individual embers carried by the wind, not a raging wall of fire. In part, that's because firefighters Phos-Chek the hell out of endangered neighborhoods. During mandatory evacuations, the only people who can defend against embers are the limited number of available firefighters (the ranks of whom do not, for dumb bureaucratic reasons, include all the available firefighting talent from nearby military bases), homeowners who refuse to evacuate ... and a handful of AIG firefighting crews. AIG adds to the net firefighting capacity, and saved non-covered houses during the recent fires. If Perlstein indeed wants to provide every fire-zone home with $1,000 worth of Phos-Chek, well, good on him. Though something tells me that the same people who object to the rich having extra fire protection will squawk even louder when millionaire hillside dwellers get tens of millions in subsidized fire retardant every year.

Also, there is no fire-retardant valhalla in which "there would be no wildfire."

2) While I appreciate the "paycheck to paycheck" sentiment, that really, truly does not accurately describe the vast majority of people who live in Southern California's most fire-vulnerable areas. Recall that AIG's hated insurance, according to the L.A. Times, "is offered only to homeowners in California's most affluent ZIP Codes." (This itself is technically inaccurate -- the insurance is not available at such tony addresses as Palos Verdes Peninsula [90274], Manhattan Beach [90266], San Francisco [94123] and San Jose [95120].) It's a neat trick to begrudge the rich in one breath, and then imagine in the next that their next-door neighbors are living paycheck to paycheck. Recall, too, that one of Mike Davis' great critiques about letting Malibu burn was that the city had way too many fire stations compared to the poor folk in the flats. So if we don't want the rich to get more public assistance, and we don't want the rich to get more private assistance, what is it that we really want here?

Also, I said "lousy," not "paltry," though either can fairly describe the comparative and available cost for a SoCal canyon dweller to provide his/her own personal protection against certain catastrophe. For more disproportionate response, read on!

The debate over whether Robert Goulet should get a lung becomes moot, as the rafters-shivering singer dies at Cedars-Sinai. Information and slideshow here.

Philip F. Mangano and Gary Blasi argue that money spend dealing with homelessness in L.A. could be better spent combating it:

When we add up the arrests, incarcerations, emergency medical care and other crisis interventions, the true costs of chronic homelessness are staggering: $35,000 to $150,000 per person per year. By contrast, the annual cost of supportive housing for a person with serious mental illness or addiction disease is between $13,000 and $25,000. And once stabilized, many can qualify for federal disability and health insurance or get jobs that will further reduce local costs.

Yet Los Angeles seems stuck maintaining the expensive and ultimately unproductive policies of the past. On skid row, for instance, the Los Angeles Police Department deployed 50 additional officers and also expanded its drug enforcement effort. In the first year of that initiative, the LAPD issued about 12,000 citations for minor offenses and made about 9,000 arrests -- in an area with a population of about 12,000, about 5,000 of whom are homeless.

Columnist Gregory Rodriguez explores America's reliance on religion during a disaster and dueling tendency toward more worldly finger-pointing in the aftermath. UC Davis professor emerita Sandra M. Gilbert muses over the meaning behind Halloween and other fall celebrations involving the dead.

The editorial board worries that the CIA's inspection of its own inspector general's office "has created the impression that a watchdog is being muzzled." It gives a thumbs-up for filmmaker Ed Burns' decision to distribute his new movie through iTunes, and laments Congress's well-meaning but ineffective move to expand the definition of hate crimes to cover sexual orientation.

Readers react to Rosa Brooks' column regarding the White House's sanity. Ronald Jones counters, "Rosa Brooks implies that the Bush administration and its leaders are the psychotics, but are they any crazier than those she would conciliate with?"

We've had plenty of cause for celebration lately that we are not bound by Article 301 of the Turkish penal code (which specifies a six-month-to-three year prison sentence for insulting "being a Turk, the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly") or even by Article 125 (three months for offending "honour, reputation, dignity or prestige"), but we're even gladder than usual after a tour through the editorial board's contemporaneous coverage of the Armenian genocide.

The blunt instrument of a penal code will never have much to say about writing style, and there's plenty of evidence that the Times' sympathy with the Armenians — a sensibility widely shared by Americans at the time — was genuine. But somehow the expressions of pity for the Christian peoples of a far-off land seem perfunctory; it's only in denunciations of the Turks, or as the board preferred at the time, "the Turk," that those nameless, faceless writers of yore rose to anything like poetry. Or actually, that's only half-true: The wartime eds are brimming with couplets and quatrains and someties whole stanzas from Lord Byron, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Bible and occasionally the doggerelists of the ed board themselves, and I'm making it my mission to work more Byron into future editorials. Anyway, let's go to the tape:

Dec. 18, 1917: THE END OF TURKEY
There is as much cause for including Turkey and Bulgaria in our declaration of war as there is for including Austria Hungary. There are as good reasons for the extinction of the Ottoman empire as there are for the overthrow of the government of the Kaiser. For 500 years the Turks have been a curse to Christendom, engaged in war after war and massacre after massacre. During the early middle ages there was built in the Balkans large and prosperous cities on the ruins of the civilization of Rome. The Turks found there a fertile and cultivated country. The cities which they seized became ruined and deserted villages. "Wherever they have trodden," said Henry Cabot Lodge, "trade, industry, commerce and the arts and civilization have withered away..." [...]

At least half of the Armenian people have been slaughtered in cold blood and the remnant is only preserved now because a large part of Armenia has falled under Russian control and the other Armenians have taken refuge there.

Feb. 26, 1918:

MARTYRED PEOPLES
When a peace of victory is finally achieved Germany must answer for her inhumanities in Belgium; Austria for the depopulation of Serbia, and Turkey for the almost total annihilation of the Armenians. [...]

If the war continues for another year with Serbia in possession of its arch enemies, it will be impossible to repatriate the Serbian people, for it will have ceased to exist. The same is true to an equal extent with Armenia; but the slaughter has been greater there because the population was greater. In six years the native population of Armenia has sunk from 16,000,000 persons to less than 800,000. Those who have approved this policy of extermination must be made to settle. The German, Austrian and Turkish peoples have approved and taken part in this wholesale murder; they should be forced to pay a huge indemnity.

March 3, 1918:

THE STAND OF UNCLE SAM
When the President said the peoples should not be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty, he had in mind the combined force and intrigue by which Germany holds Alsace-Lorraine today, by which Austria continues to dominate and enslave Hungary, and by which Turkey is depopulating Armenia and Arabia. [...]

When President Wilson declared that all well-defined national aspirations must be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them, he indicated clearly that Armenia must be relieved of the crushing yoke of Turkis oppression...

Nov. 10, 1919 (apparently a West Coast first-reaction to the Armistice):

THE HAND OF GOD
When we think of Armenia, safe after more than a thousand years from the incessant butchery of the filthy and unspeakable Turks, [...] we behold miracles not less than any told in holy writ.

Therefore, the inevitable conclusion must be that God is still in his heavens. His hand is still upon us.

It's in the postwar settling up, however, that things begin to get murky. A tone of unease seeps into the ed board's wartime bravado. From May 28, 1919:

CAN OLD WRONGS BE RIGHTED?
Armenians for centuries have been ceaselessly disinherited and destroyed. So today even in Armenia proper they are hopelessly outnumbered by the Turks and Kurds. Either these Turks and Kurds would have to be violently deported or some stronger nation would have to keep a permanent army of occupation in this inhospitable country to insure the Armenians against daily revolutions. In the first case you are writing one injustice by perpetrating another. In the second you are passing a decree on the young men of a country that was wholly innocent of the original wrong.

Europe, in a dubious compliment to the United States, has picked our self-sacrificing country as the mandatory power for the new Armenia. But our young Americans who would have to be drafted into this large army of occupation (for no American would willingly leave the United States to go and dwell in distant Armenia) might have something cogent to say about the justice of such an arrangement.

That second paragraph may not ring any bells, but it's the opening of an interesting seesaw campaign for the editorial board. The postwar debate over the Armenian mandate (described by Wikipedia in one sentence: "There was even consideration of possibly making Armenia a mandate under the protection of the United States") seems inconsequential now, but while it was live the issue cost the Times years of foment, and led to a variation on the great American debate between pragmatic non-intervention and reckless idealism. On June 6, 1919, the ed board is all for the mandate:

SHOULD ACCEPT THE ARMENIAN MANDATE
The United States should unhesitatingly accept the mandate of the League of Nations for Turkey and Armenia. [...] Unquestionably the United States is best qualified to handle the affairs of Turkey and Armenia. First, we have no national "ax to grind." No European nation has the slightest reason for jealousy of us or for suspicion as to our intentions and motives. Second, the Turks and Armenians themselves would both prefer us as rulers to any other nation. While unsparingly condemning his atrocious crimes, to the Turk we have been friendly as it is possible to be. American missionaries and Robert College, established by them at Constantinople, have given the Turk a large share of the limited culture and civilization which he has been capable of assimilating. To the Armenian we have been the best of friends. We have fed him in the hour of need; we have often protected him from atrocities at the hands of the Turks. To the Armenian, fleeing from the Turk, the United States is the Land of Promise, his hope and refuge.

Moreover, the ed board was persuaded that this military action could be done on the cheap. From the same editorial:

The government of the former Ottoman dominions would impose no burden whatever upon us. There would be a small army of occupation composed entirely of adventure-seeking volunteers who might adopt the military profession for life. No man would be drafted for such service. If perchance not enough Americans volunteered friendly aliens of good character could be accepted and many soldiers from the disbanding Allied armies would doubtless be glad to serve for the higher rates of pay in the American army.

By the end of that summer, the Times was conspicuously less confident on this point. Sept. 11, 1919:

THE SAME OLD TURK
Shall America accept the mandate to administer Armenia? This question is a hard one to answer and the discussions beyond the Rockies on the subject show a wide cleavage.

And by the following year, the ed board's hesitation had hardened into opposition. Feb. 22, 1920:

What better way to prepare for President Bush's speech tonight than reading our Dust-up about the surge and Sept. 11? Conservative talker Hugh Hewitt and anti-imperialist author Doug Bandow have been going back and forth all week. Today they re-imagine the prosecution of the War on Terror. One-sentence highlights:
Bandow: "The problem is too many missions, not too few people."
Hewitt: "This real [world] is dangerous and becoming more so, and the only solutions are hard ones, extraordinarily costly in the sacrifices demanded."

Yesterday they chewed on the meaning of Osama bin Laden.
Hewitt: "Bin Laden did not see the ferocity of the counter-attack, and he definitely did not count on George Bush, which is why last week's letter bristles with anger at the president and at the Democrats who were supposed to bring about the long-predicted collapse in the American will to fight."
Bandow: "What he says is less important than his survival, which reflects administration failure in the war on terrorism."

Tuesday was the sixth anniversary of Sept. 11.
Bandow: "[T]he Iraq war continues to make us more vulnerable to terrorism."
Hewitt: "[T]he world is also much safer today because Saddam Hussein was overthrown and his mad-as-hatter sons are dead and not in line for the throne; the U.N. oil-for-food-for-dictators-sending-money-and-arms-to-terrorists-while-corrupting-officials-in-other-governments was exposed and ended; Libya's WMD program was dismantled; scores of Al Qaeda's senior leadership are dead or imprisoned (with more ending up that way each week), the A.Q. Khan network has been cabined; and the U.S. military is embedded with new or longtime allies around the world, teaching them the basics of counter-terrorism."

And Monday they debated the Petraeus report.
Hewitt: "Perhaps my debating partner here at Dust-Up will be among the first to ask of MoveOn.org "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" and begin what should be a broad rush by the Democrats on the Hill and then across the country to denounce MoveOn.org and to refuse their sponsorships and their money."
Bandow: "[T]he more relevant question is whether the administration will consider critically Gen. Petraeus' views, or simply cherry-pick his report to back its preexisting position."

Tune in tomorrow, when the two discuss (again?) the politicization of national security.

What were our leading local lights reflecting on six years after the Day Everything (or Nothing) Changed? Charles Johnson, the west side jazz musician and web designer who became the Web's most controversial example of a liberal mugged by Se