Galley Friend CS sends along a remarkable exchange from one of those helpful Q & A online sessions set up by the Washington Post. This one’s hosted by a local psychologist who discourages parents from teaching their children materialistic values this Christmas. Her interlocuter sees the situation a little differently.

what money can buy

Alexandria, Va.: I’m one of the “materialistic” parents that you talk about, a defense lobbyist who supposedly has “too little time” for my children. I give my kids the iPods and $200 sneakers so they can show these things off. If you live like you’re successful, you will be successful. Other kids will naturally follow my kids, which helps my kids be leaders. My kids’ teachers think twice before they give my kid a B+, or before they cast someone else as the lead in the school play. That’s the extra grease I can give my kids so they follow in my footsteps and be just as successful as I am.

Pat Dalton: We probably raise kids who are a lot like us, and value what we value. It would be hard to do it any other way.

Over at Power Line, Paul Mirengoff and Scott Johnson are trying to get some help for Steve Gardner, the Swift boat vet who suddenly lost his job after criticizing John Kerry.

Fine, I give up. I hate anonymous blogging. I think it’s at best unhelpful and at worst and invitation to mischief. But I understand that it is also, sometimes, a necessity. In the past I’ve been converted by the great and powerful Soxblog and now I’m giving up the ghost on The Belmont Club. Wretchard’s post on Alexander the Great is about as smart and interesting as anything I’ve seen written about the movie. It’s great stuff.

But I will make a plea that Wretchard come out (so the speak). It would give his writings that much more punch to have a name attached.

A little while ago, we asked people what their

favorite movie lines were. Showing the difference between men and boys, today Hugh Hewitt asks what novels are worth rereading.

Hugh, who really is a scholar and a gentleman, nominates several worthies–including The Lord of the Rings.

I would add The Great Gatsby. I speak with zero authority on the subject (I’m the most poorly read homo sapiens in this hemisphere, a fact which I blame–nearly convincingly!–on a college education which afforded me the time to read not a single real book), but I love Gatsby the way a 15-year-old loves porn. (If you still need convincing, Chris Hitchens loves Gatsby, too.)

Still, the person we should really turn to here is Skinner, who surely has smart thoughts on all of this. David?

Update, 11/30/04, 4:52 p.m.: Galley Friend K.T. sends in this erudite missive:

* Tongues of Angels, Reynolds Price. If you haven’t read it, you should. Price is one of the great Southern writers: lyrical, prolific, deeply religious, and with a way to spin a phrase that will wind you up backwards. He’s complex, fascinating, and his writing evidences compassion for his characters, unlike some so-called “great novelists” who prefer to take their characters out for a good thrashing just because critics reward angst. The first read through, it seems childlike. The second read through, it’s hopelessly complex. And by the third, you’re savoring each sentence and finding nuggets in there you didn’t know existed and phrases you’ll quote to your friends.

* To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee. Not modern, but worth re-reading whenever you feel a little doubt about the way the world is and should be.

* What the Scarecrow Said, Stewart Ikeda. A beautiful moving portrait of Japanese internment camps and the strange bedfellows that wartime may bring. Reread when you want to feel better about human nature . . . or worse.

* Anything by Anthony Doerr. Tony’s one of the young writers of our generation who can make prose sing. He is best known for his collection of short stories entitled “The Shell Collector” but his new book Grace is complicated and interesting and challenging all in one.

Important New York Sun piece lost over the holiday weekend, concerning interior design changes at the Yale Club in NYC. here (via New Criterion’s blog Armavirumque) (Inside baseball note: Article quotes the blog, which then promotes the article when it’s published.)

Galley Friend B.W. passes along this hilarious post from David Burge about good blue-state families whose children become rednecks. Sample:

Across coastal America, increasing numbers of families are discovering that their children have been lured into “Cracker” culture–a new, freewheeling underground youth movement that celebrates the hedonistic thrills of frog-gigging and outlaw modified sprint cars. No one knows their exact number, but sociologists say that the movement is exploding among young people in America’s most fashionable zip codes.

“We first detected it a few years ago, with the emergence of the trucker hat phenomenon,” says Gerard Levin, professor of abnormal sociology at the University of California. “At first we thought it was some sort of benign, ironic strain. By the time we realized the early wearers really were interested in seed corn hybrids and Peterbilts, it had already escaped containment.”

Levin points to ‘Patient Zero,’ who in 1997 was a 23-year old graduate student in Gender Studies at San Francisco State University.

“During a cross-country trip to New York, he stopped at the Iowa 80 Truck Stop in Walcott, Iowa, and bought a John Deere gimme cap as a gag souvenir,” says Levin. “Within a year, he had dropped out of graduate school, abandoned his SoMa apartment, and and was working at a drive-thru liquor store. Today he is a wealthy televangelist in Bossier City, Louisiana.”

The contagion of ‘Patient Zero’ would prove devastating. Soon trucker hats were appearing throughout trendy coastal neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Park Slope and Portrero Hill, often accessorized with chain wallets and ‘wife beater’ t-shirts. A new alternative youth movement had emerged, rejecting the staid norms of establishment NPR society and embracing the ‘tune-in, turn-on, chug-up’ ethos of the Pabst Blue Ribbon underground. Before long, it would broadcast its siren call to an even younger generation–one whose parents were woefully unequipped to recognize it. . . .

There’s more and it’s full of the funny.

Because he’s a flashy–one might even say insouciant–stylist, it’s easy to underestimate what a great writer Matt Labash is. And because he’s such a great writer, nobody gives him the credit he deserves for being one of the finest reporters working.

Go read Labash’s piece about his trip to the Clinton Library. Print it out; savor it. Pure genius.

Tom Wolfe’s new book, I am Charlotte Simmons, has been getting mugged by reviewers, so it’s refreshing to come across a well-spoken defense like this one in the Wichita Eagle. I’m particularly grateful for the author’s use of an Evelyn Waugh quote, in reference to Rudyward Kipling, whom Waugh said was “conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.”

What a perfect description of Waugh himself, among others.