I'm not one to say "vast right-wing conspiracy," but...

From Washingtonpost.com:

"While drafted in terms applicable mainly to the case before it, the opinion [of the court, regarding Cheney's 2001 energy task force and the request for documents regarding that task force to be turned over,] revealed a court now sympathetic to the White House's need to insulate itself from lawsuits. In 1997, the court ruled 9 to 0 that President Bill Clinton would not be unduly hampered by Paula Jones's lawsuit for sexual harassment he had allegedly committed while governor of Arkansas; yesterday, the court warned of 'meritless claims against the executive branch.'"

(Oh, ok, I am one to say "vast right-wing conspiracy.")

We went to see the new HP this weekend, and, as usual, the empress and I had entirely opposite reactions. Where I thought it was lovely and more visually, hmm, stimulating than the first two, I found there to be more gaps in the narration, more holes, the story moving too quickly, not as compelling. It's as though there was simply too much story to put into a movie, so they decided to focus on making it very, very pretty. And of course C thought that narratively, it was the best of the three. I will never understand how we can walk out of a theater together feeling as though we'd seen two completely different movies.

I really wanted to go down to the MW afterwards, but curses! They were having some silly Hyde Park Community fund raiser and everyone was wearing hula shirts and leis. No thank you. We ended up sitting in the arboretum until 2:30 in the morning, drinking beer and talking about every random thing. Despite the plethora of bugbites I now find myself covered with, we had a spectacular night. It's our new summer night hang out. Who needs crowded, noisy bars when there's the arboretum right there?

I've been reading Nancy Mitford the past few days, and am finding myself thinking like a turn-of-the-century British aristocrat. These novels are actually pretty fun to read. It's like stepping into a world completely different from my own, but in the opposite way from reading Mahfouz. It's all landed gentry and coming-out balls and marriage marriage marriage (but only the right and proper kind). Very fascinating. And Mitford writes with the most subtle, quiet wit, I absolutely adore it. It all feels very frivolous and fun, in the way "The Nanny Diaries" was supposed to be last weekend. Instead, "The Nanny Diaries" just made me sad (there are people in this world who should never give birth). Nancy Mitford is perfect summer reading.

Hmmm. Burnt coffee...it smells like hot dogs. Has anyone ever noticed this? Why is this? What is the connection between burnt coffee and processed pork products? Discuss.

In the "oh, so that's who our vice president is" files:

From Washingtonpost.com:

"You know who the White House thinks should pay for their deficit? They think it ought to be children in Head Start, women with young babies who need nutritional help, veterans who need health care. . . . And if you think that's compassionate conservatism, then Dick Cheney is Mr. Rogers." - John F. Kerry

Heh. Heh heh.

From Washingtonpost.com:

"During the Clinton years, Jeremy Tuck said he had been selling mobile homes in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and, at $45,000 a year, making good money. Last year, he was assembling mobile homes, earning $15,000 and living hand-to-mouth. But Bush has his vote this November. Had Gore been elected in 2000, Tuck said, 'we would've been taken over by Saddam Hussein or [Osama] bin Laden.' "

Yup. Definitely would have been taken over by Saddam Hussein. It was soley the aegis of Dubya that prevented us from becoming A-rabs. If them stinkin' liberals had been in power, the United States of America would have been left unprotected. Hell! those stinkin' liberals prolly woulda LET them A-rabs in. They woulda INVITED 'em! We'd all be worshippin' Allah and sendin' our kids to Israel with bombs strapped to their chests.

Should one laugh at these kinds of sentiments, or just feel supremely sorrowful?

Alright, curse me if you will for being irreverant in the face of a man's death, but, truth be told, I never had much love for Mr. Reagan, anyway.

I can't help but reflect on the irony of the false security alert that occurred just before Reagan's service in Washington. Todd Purdum, in the New York Times, describes it like this:

In a vivid sign of the intense anxiety over security, a little more than two hours before the service was to begin the entire Capitol and adjoining offices were hastily evacuated in what turned out to be a false alarm. The Federal Aviation Administration said a radio transmitter had malfunctioned on a Beech King aircraft belonging to the Kentucky State Police as it neared Washington airspace. The device is supposed to identify the craft to air controllers, but it failed intermittently, prompting a heightened alert.

Capitol police officers, shouting "Airborne threat, four minutes out!" ordered an evacuation as loud alarms sounded, and dozens of dignitaries and former Reagan aides gathered in a reception room near the Senate floor went running down the north steps of the Senate wing. In dark suits and black dresses, mourners including former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, former Vice President Dan Quayle and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the former ambassador to the United Nations, hustled into the muggy late afternoon sunshine, with men shucking their jackets and women under orders to remove high heels if they could not run in them.

"They came in screaming at us like you can't believe," said Margaret D. Tutwiler, the former State Department spokeswoman, who with the others returned to the building when the alert was lifted after several minutes. "They said, 'you can't walk, you have to run.'"

The irony's not immediately clear?

Reagan's administration was responsible for some of the worse foreign policy offenses, especially in the Middle East. I'm not saying the intense hatred for America in Islamic countries is the fault of Reagan and his ilk; the reasons for that go much farther back and are the fault of far more than one person. But Reagan sure didn't help, and I do think that the "war on terror" we're currently facing likely wouldn't be happening were it not for some of the decisions and movements made during his administration.

Now we live in a state of constant alert, constant fear, seeing danger in every malfunctioning state police aircraft. It seems fitting that this fear should disrupt the funereal atmosphere of a man who helped make it so.

Maybe I just haven't had enough coffee this morning, and am making random, unfeasible connections here. Whatever. I thought it was funny.

I have been immersed in all things Islam lately. Well, literarally, anyway. I just finished reading Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, the first book in the Cairo Trilogy. Reading this book sent me into culture shock, just sitting on my couch. I got so sucked into the story, the characters, and the strangeness of the traditional Islamic culture, that I would look up and forget that I was allowed to leave the house, despite being a woman.

Palace Walk was written in 1956, and maybe it's just the translation, but the formality of the prose really contributes to the sense of antiquity, of stepping backward into another world, one I could not imagine being part of. It made me wonder, over and over, whether life in places like Iran, or Afghanistan, is still as stifled, as repressive, as the life depicted by Mahfouz in Cairo at the turn of the century.

To follow up on my foray into Islamic studies, I started Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. I've been looking foward to reading this book for months, and thus far, it's living up to all my expectations. Nafisi relates what is was like living in Iran during the revolution, contextualizing her memories in her story about a clandestine reading group she led in the early 1990s. It's fascinating.

All I ever hear about Islam, though, are these stories about fundamentalism, about its repressive side, its traditional side. I want a broader picture. I want to see the side that would make a Western woman, someone I've known since childhood, convert. I want to see the good things. I'm sure they exist.