I speak of Berkeley, where a spring forum was held by the chamber of commerce to discuss a sit-lie ordinance – which would ban sitting or lying on sidewalks within commercial districts during work hours. 

It was based on a similar ordinance in San Francisco – but word got out, protests erupted, and everyone ran scared. 

See, the ordinance would have cleared the streets of dirtbags like me who clog sidewalks with aggressive panhandling. 

But now, because protests scared off it’s proponents, fearful students will now flock to safer places, rather than risk getting assaulted by meth-heads. 

And so here’s what happens when tolerance triumphs over safety. The end result is filth and lawlessness. 

And the rest of us flee. 

A survey of 1800 students found that half avoid downtown Berkeley because its dirty and dangerous. And women are especially fearful – perhaps because some creepy dudes want more than change. 

But shouldn’t it bug the left that the most progressive people on the planet are willing to sacrifice the safety of its city’s female students – all to save face at their poetry readings? 

Probably not. 

They’d rather put co-eds at risk, than their reputations as open-minded libs. 

So as another progressive Utopia is realized, let us all thank the summer of love – by romanticizing squalor and condemning order – it leaves you with a filthy town and no one to clean it.

Tonight:

Ann Coulter

Jesse Joyce

Matt McCall

After listening to these misty-eyed reveries, I usually press them with what, to anyone else, would be the obvious question: If it was all so great, why did they leave the Haight and the Castro and all of their associated communes and bong-fueled revolutions behind, and fall into a more conventional lifestyle elsewhere? Why not continue living in what was, according to them, the closest thing to paradise on earth imaginable?

The answer, boiled down, is usually some variant of “I realized the lifestyle was killing me — that if I didn’t get away I would soon be dead.” I’ve heard tales of bad drug trips, violence and paranoia, anarchism and terrorism, and any number of utterly disgusting and disease-ridden sexual perversions. Promising paradise and delivering nightmares is as good a definition of socialism as any (socialism, communism, liberalism, progressivism — call it what you will, it’s all the same poison, just delivered in different doses and by different means). Every few decades a new group of idealistic young fools attempt to stage a new revolt (“Yes, we can!”) in an attempt to overturn the wisdom of their forefathers and the immutable laws of reality, and each time they end up like Icarus, staging spectacular belly-flops into cesspools of unintended consequences.

Examine the cinema of the era, and you’ll see this whole thing play out again and again. Easy Rider, Billy Jack, Vanishing Point, The French Connection, Apocalypse Now!, and so many others glorified nihilism, hedonism, revolution, and hopelessness. Again and again we were treated to, on the one hand, liberal myths of heroes striving mightily to fight, escape, or ignore evil conservative society only to be mercilessly extinguished, and on the other stories of conservatives discovering the corruption and emptiness infecting their base values and ideals.

One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that I came of age not in the late Sixties, when America was descending into this chaos, but in the early Eighties, when Ronald Reagan was dragging us out of it.

Reagan was a longtime FDR-Democrat turned staunch Republican — once, when reporter Sam Donaldson tried to embarrass Reagan at a press conference by asking him pointedly if he bore any of the blame for the country’s fiscal woes, Reagan shot back, “Yes, because for many years I was a Democrat.” He argued tirelessly for a return to can-do American optimism, family values, and conservative policies, bringing both domestic inflation and foreign totalitarians to heel.

Wherever he spoke, one could almost feel the deeply destructive hippie mindset of the Seventies fleeing like a vampire from sunlight. I find it poetically appropriate that would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr. was obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver — it was as if the entire Seventies zeitgeist, encapsulated into one deranged man, was striking out in a last-gasp effort to stave off what was coming. When Reagan not only took the bullet but virtually laughed it off, that was the true end of the Flower Power era and its often insane grip on the popular culture.

At the same time Reagan was transforming us politically, guys like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were transforming our cinema. They were suburban kids who, unlike many of their filmmaking friends, had largely avoided the hippie lifestyle, and their early efforts at politicized “message” filmmaking (Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express, Lucas’ THX-1138) were flops. It was only when they embraced the needs and desires of America’s great middle class, in effect becoming the unwitting cinematic arm of the Reagan Revolution, that they experienced the stupendous success for which they are best known.

They did this not by being avant-garde or trying to impress liberal critics or professors, but by refreshing themselves at the wells of myths, old movies, and pulps (much of them politically incorrect), and then infusing their new versions of those tales with a sense of optimism largely absent from the hyper-politicized movies of the Seventies. Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in addition to being monster hits, don’t feel as if they belong in the 1970s at all. Monsters, sci-fi, special effects, genuine everyman heroes, conventional happy endings — they instead are the harbingers of the mass flowering of such films (and books, and video games) throughout the 1980s, movies that inspired and entertained more than they depressed or preached, that recapitulated the alleged “Goody Two-Shoes” cinema of their youth rather than rebelled against it.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Reagan is destined to become something of a Lincoln figure in our nation’s history. He brought optimism and rejuvenation to an America wrecked for over a decade by liberalism (in both parties), and in so doing set the stage for one of the Golden Ages of cinema: the era of the populist, family-friendly, PG-rated blockbuster. It was a great time, for both the nation and its moviegoers.

NOTE: No bears were actually hit by a bus during the making of this video. Actually, I think there was an incident in Wyoming, but that wasn’t us.

See, when I arrived at Berkeley as a freshman some 25 years ago, the city not only helped to transform my political self, but reinforced a cynicism already brewing inside me concerning the meaning of true rebellion. I was a punk in high school, for sure, and embraced generic left wing dogma – for it impressed teachers and even won extra credit in various classes. As a teenager, it also gave me what I craved: attention, some relevance, and a chance to get lucky with hippie chicks. That last desire was never achieved – because I had attended an all boy high school. But no matter, I practiced on the drama students.

But when I got to Berkeley, I saw what true subversion was – and it wasn’t the “subversives” at Berkeley. See, the idea of rebellion means nothing when it’s turned into a personal identity. Dying your hair pink, dipping yourself in tattoo ink and getting ten nipple rings – these acts become not markers of rebellion, but markers of conformity. In Berkeley – the real sheep pretended to be rebels, and those who looked like sheep – were the real bad-asses. The engineering major with back acne was far more rebellious than the coffee house commie in her Crass t-shirt.

Berkeley embraced “subversives,” and they were often called “eccentrics,” which is a nice way of saying they smelled awful. Berkeley celebrated “craziness,” even if it was authentic mental illness – and I am fairly certain a great many of the folks they lauded for their nonconformist behavior would die alone, by their own hands, with no one there to tell them how cool their suffering was.

And so in 1983, I realized that a true rebel blends in, embraces discipline, hard work, and clean pants. I joined a fraternity. I cut off my long crazy mop of hair. I started tanning – I am not sure why, but it seemed the opposite of heroin chic. I also took up the banjo, just to keep it real.

If you’re starting college now, I suggest you do the same.

And if you disagree with me, then you’re probably a racist.

Tonight we have the delightful Ann Coulter, the intriguing Alex Blagg, and the jovial George Wendt.

Want to know the Obama Administration’s idea of what constitutes art?  There’s no better place to look than the newly-reconstituted White House art collection.  So what’s there?  How about this gem:

Yes, it is boring and banal.  It does look like your three-year-old’s recent construction paper cut-out from pre-school – the one she made with the rounded scissors.  It’s Watusi (Hard Edge), by black painter Alma Thomas.

Now here’s Henri Matisse’s The Snail (1953).

Notice any similarities?  How about now:

That’s right.  It’s a direct copy of the Matisse picture rotated 90 degrees and the colors inverted.  What magnificent art.

Sort of reminiscent of the Shepherd Fairey plagiaristic “art” poster for Obama, ripped off directly from an AP photo:

But let’s not assume that all Obama’s art is this bad.  Let’s look at it.  How about this masterpiece by Ed Ruscha, appropriately entitled “I Think I’ll…”:

Isn’t that magnificent?  It certainly sums up Obama’s thinking process, which is based on considering all the options, then eating a cup of applesauce and taking a nap while waiting for mommy (read: Valerie Jarrett) to make a decision.

Or how about another Alma Thomas piece, “Sky Light,” which could more appropriately be titled “inverted ant races on your broken television set”:

Then there’s “Berkeley, No. 52,” by Richard Diebenkorn (1955), which aptly sums up how the world must have looked to Obama while attending a liberal college and doing cocaine:

And, in case we forgot that the Obama’s are black, the text of “Black Like Me” on a piece of canvas (Glenn Ligon’s “Black Like Me No. 2”):

It’s as though the Obamas decided to do a poll as to what Americans would least like to post in their living rooms, then adopted all the top choices, with special credit to black artists based on their race.  No doubt, Malia and Sasha will have an entire wing of the White House dedicated to their Play-Doh sculptures.  And the New York Times will praise their artistic flair.

In essence, the Obamas are elitists who think that the inscrutable is deep, and that the incompetent is profound.  Sadly, President Obama’s presidency is the same as his art: something that outsiders assume has substance, even in the absence of substance.

[Ed update: first two images are now in the correct order.]

The Nobel Prize Committee announced today that it is awarding the Prize in Medicine to Jimmy Duncan, a senior at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York, for getting a 97 on his bio-chem final.

“The Committee felt that Master Duncan has shown great promise with his outstanding grades,” said Dr. Leif Quisling, chairperson of the Nobel Prize Committee.  “It is our fervent hope that this award encourages him to do great things in the future, such as find a cure for cancer.”

The committee was first alerted to Jimmy Duncan when they came across a YouTube clip of Duncan’s class presentation on his career goals.

“We were particularly struck by his unbridled optimism,” said Dr. Quisling. “Duncan closed his passionate talk with these inspiring words:  ’And we can end cancer in our lifetimes if we all work together really, really hard!’  It is exactly those kind of empty platitudes that impress this committee. Far more so than anything so gauche as actual achievement.”

Mr. Duncan was somewhat blase’ about the news.  “I was lying in bed playing a little X-Box before heading off to school when my mom yelled, ‘Jimmy, you’ve got a phone call from Stockholm!’  It was pretty cool, yeah.”

Dr. Quisling acknowledged that the committee was inspired to award prizes prematurely after giving President Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize the year before, despite the fact that nominations had been closed only 11 days after he entered office.

“In Barack Obama’s case, we figured that if the American people were willing to hand over the U.S. presidency to someone who hasn’t accomplished much, why not give him the Nobel Peace Prize before he’s done anything, either?” Dr. Quisling said.

As for Jimmy Duncan, 17, he says he’s “psyched” about the Nobel Prize.  “I should be a shoo-in now to get into Harvard,” he said.

“By the way, I’m not going pre-med anymore,” Duncan volunteered.  ”Now that I’ve got the Nobel in Medicine, why bother?  I’ll just invest my prize money in a diversified fund and I never have to work another day in my life.  In fact, I may just skip Harvard and go to a party school.  Arizona State, here I come!”

We contacted Dr. Quisling’s office for a comment on Duncan’s change in plans.  Nobody returned our calls by press time.

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UC Berkeley takes cue from Nobel committee, teachers award grades based on students’ hopes, not results