Unfortunately, its TV avatar has abandoned the judiciousness of the print journal and descended into the debased vulgarity and sensationalism of what passes for kulchur today.

As I write NatGeoTV is showing a program on what “will” happen when alien invaders attack the Nation’s Capital. We are given the impression that planning for this inevitability is already underway, numerous “experts” are interviewed, and simulations presented.

This apocalyptic scenario is joined by a new feature on NatGeo: “Doomsday Preppers.” Why we need an expose of those who lead the paranoid delusional lifestyle is beyond me. Perhaps a single one-hour documentary might have sufficed, but, if the trailers for the series are any indication, the subjects of this series take great delight in having their 15 minutes of infamy, and mug appropriately for the camera.

If you’ve had your fill of end-times chaos, NatGeo will feed the American addiction for crime: Alaska State Troopers, Border Wars (the other kind of aliens are featured here), American Weed (it’s not about lawn care), and Locked Up Abroad are also available.

The National Geographic Society proclaims that it has been “inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888,” but if its TV lineup is a reflection of the planet, I don’t care anymore. The doomsday preppers can have it all to themselves.

So why are we still allowing a demographic anomaly — people in places like Iowa and New Hampshire — to kidnap and hold for ransom our political process? Most Americans are not employed in corn manufacturing or dairy production, so why do we allow those who are to set the economic agenda in presidential elections? Iowa and New Hampshire also are not representative of America’s complex racial, ethnic and cultural diversity, so why are we allowing their interests to create the grounds for our national debate?

Instead, as Frank Bruni pointed out recently in the New York Times (“Iowa’s Harvest”), the Iowas caucus serves as a distillery of extreme right wing activism, and the pandering politicians who love them:

AS the hour of actual caucusing drew closer, Ron Paul’s campaign trumpeted his endorsement by a pastor who, as it happens, has spoken of executing homosexuals. Rick Perry pledged to devote predator drones and thousands of troops to the protection of the Mexican border, making the mission to keep every last illegal immigrant from crossing sound as urgent as rooting out terrorists in Pakistan.

And Rick Santorum, bringing his “Faith, Family and Freedom” tour to this eastern Iowa town on Thursday, promised never to be cowed by all those craven secularists who believe that a stable, healthy household needn’t be headed by a God-fearing mom and dad.

None of these three men is likely to win the Republican nomination. But before they exit stage right — stage far right, that is — they and a few of their similarly quixotic, similarly strident competitors will do no small measure of damage to the Republican Party and no great favors to the country as a whole. What happens in Iowa doesn’t stay in Iowa: it befouls Republicans’ image nationally, becomes a millstone around the eventual nominee’s neck and legitimizes debate about some matters that shouldn’t be debatable.

The run-up to the Iowa caucuses, like the rest of the primary season thus far, has underscored just how much general nuttiness and moral extremism the party has come to accommodate, with Iowa serving as a theater of the conservative absurd. The state’s unrepresentative caucuses — in which a mere 100,000 or so of the most fervent voters, almost all of them white, are expected to participate — coax a Bible-thumping, border-militarizing harshness from candidates that’s a tonal turnoff to the swing voters who will probably decide the general election.

As Bruni observes, Americans generally and Democrats specifically would benefit from a reasonable, intelligent, and sane Republican party able to provide a healthy dialectic in our current moment. It’s too bad that our agrarian romanticism and small-town nostalgia, now almost a century out of touch with reality, continue to set the agenda for the national political campaign.

Since Republicons are usually hysterians rather than historians, this page from our Puritan founder William Bradford (1590-1657) might be instructive:

“On the day called Christmas-day, the Governor called them out to work, (as was used) but the most of this new company excused themselves, and said it went against their …consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it matter of conscience, he would spare them, till they were better informed; so he led away the rest and left them; but when they came home at noon, from their work, he found them in the street at play openly; some pitching the bar, and some at stool-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them, that was against his conscience, that they should play, and others work; if they made the keeping of it matter of devotion, let them keep their houses, but there should be no gaming, or revelling in the streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.” (Bradford, Of Plimmouth Plantation, chapter 12, Anno 1621)

If you missed the point: Our “Christian founders” forbade Christmas, which they thought to be a Popish festival, filled with pagan symbolism and having no scriptural basis.

Pictured here, serial adulterer Newt and his latest wife Callista Gingrich. (Is that necklace from Tiffany’s?)

I was an instructor at a public community college (the second lowest genus on the higher education food chain), and L. Douglas Wilder was the governor. Virginia’s economy had slipped into recession, and the US was in the midst of a presidential primary campaign. The Great Wilder, testing his presidential prospects, was traveling around the country making “policy” appearances using travel resources of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I wrote to the governor from my home address telling him that I had voted for him and that I looked to him for fiscal leadership when the state treasury was strapped, but that his travel for personal political purposes did not strike me as leading by example. A few weeks later I received the usual and accustomed letter thanking me for sharing my views.

But then several months later at a college picnic, the college’s president, a man of integrity and courage, chatting with me said, “Oh, by the way, Tom, your letter to the governor caused a bit of a stir in Richmond.” He went on to explain that the secretary of education for the commonwealth, James W. Dyke, Jr., called him to ask, What are you going to do about this employee?

My college’s president asked the secretary of education if I had written on college stationery (I hadn’t) and asked if I had written anything threatening (I hadn’t). So the president said, It sounds to me as though Mr. Long is exercising his constitutional right to free speech, and there is nothing that I am going to do about him.

I learned an important lesson: that speech, though free, may have a cost, as well as about the difference between one executive’s courage and integrity on the one hand, and another’s thin-skinned vindictiveness on the other hand.

I’m reminded of this event in my own life two decades ago (but under very similar circumstances as today) by the story of Emma Sullivan. Ms Sullivan, a high school student in Kansas, infamously tweeted on her Twitter account after a field trip to the state capital of Kansas. It is phrased in the usual vulgarly snarky idioms of adolescents and young adults: “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” (I don’t know what she actually said to him or if she said anything to him at all; this tweet may just be the usual trash talk to impress friends.)

Brownback’s official court minions, ever vigilant, monitor Twitter, and finding this tweet, contacted Ms. Sullivan’s Shawnee Mission East High School Principal Karl Krawitz, who called her into his office to reprimand her. According to Ms. Sullivan in the Huffington Post, the principal ”laid into me about how this was unacceptable and an embarrassment . . . He said I had created this huge controversy and everyone was up in arms about it … and now he had to do damage control.” She also told NBC Action News that she was asked to write the governor a formal apology. Subsequent reports indicate that she has been the object of bullying by fellow students.

The Kansas governor’s director of communication, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, is charged with the daily monitoring of any negative comments about Brownback on social-media websites. Having rid the high schools of science, this is where Kansans spend their education time and energy.

I imagine that Ms. Sullivan has learned an important lesson about adults: We are often feckless, and will devour our young to save our skins.

My hope is that “brownback” will become a common noun as “santorum” has done: brownback, (noun): the liquified fecal discharge of the gutless , usually when scared (see colostomy, colostomy bag).

Circulate.

Generation Kewl’s surrogate father, Steve Jobs, is leaving home. . . again. The media frenzy about Jobs’s departure from Apple is equaled by the blog, tweet, and Facebook chatter about Daddy Kewl, and about what Gen Kewl feels about Dad’s leaving: There will never be anything kewl for us again.

Who’s going to keep giving us kewl stuff?

What I don’t hear is any solicitude for Mr. Jobs, who has been for some time , and is apparently more precipitously now, dying. Dying. Dying from cancer. Death. Death is not kewl (unless it’s in one of the scores of movies available on iTunes). Cancer is not kewl. Instead, it’s about how I feel about Daddy Kewl’s abandoning me.

I’m old enough to remember the first divorce, when Daddy Kewl was thrown out of the house and shacked up with NeXT. Then there was the reconciliation.

I’m also old enough to remember the poignantly failed Apple computer project, The Lisa, which according to the official version was the acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture, but was also the name of Jobs’s daughter from a relationship and a daughter whose paternity he initially denied. Daddy Kewl’s been leaving for a long time.

When his time comes, may flights of angels speed Steve Jobs to his rest. In the meantime, I hope he has the opportunity to reflect on the rich, complex life he has lived and the ways that he has given joy. And sorrow.

Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Essig observes:

The neoliberal economic policies of our government, like [George] Romero’s zombies [in the movie Night of the Living Dead], continue to eat our brains when they should have been dead long ago. And the fact that no matter how clear it is that neoliberal economic policies should have been killed because they didn’t work and they brought the U.S. and the world to financial ruin, they just keep popping up, alive, ready to eat our brains. . .

But it’s 2011. Surely we should be able see neoliberal economic policies that give to the rich with the claim that it will help all of us as the monsters they are? But instead we stumble toward them, begging them to eat our brains, take our money, and make sure the super rich among us don’t pay taxes so they can continue shopping.

But what would Jesus do? Fortunately, we know without any biblical ambiguity, the ipsissima vox of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Messiah, whose Second Coming in glory Christians eagerly await:

5And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 6But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6: 5-6 [KJV])

According to Dallas News reporter Wayne Slater:

Video clips of the event’s sponsors and official endorsers cover the waterfront — claims that the Statue of Liberty is a “demonic idol,” that Oprah is the precursor of the Antichrist, that Hitler was God’s plan to get the Jews to go to Israel and that the decline in the Japanese stock market was the result of the Emperor having sex with the sun goddess. Perry has dismissed questions about the religious views of his prayer partners, saying the focus ought to be on the day of prayer and fasting, not the sponsors.

This stuff makes Glen Beck look like an Enlightenment philosophe.

The debate over raising the debt ceiling, which brought the nation to the brink of default, has sent disapproval of Congress to its highest level on record and left most Americans saying that creating jobs should now take priority over cutting spending, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

A record 82 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job — the most since The Times first began asking the question in 1977, and even more than after another political stalemate led to a shutdown of the federal government in 1995. More than four out of five people surveyed said that the recent debt ceiling debate was more about gaining political advantage than about doing what is best for the country. Nearly three-quarters said that the debate had harmed the image of the United States in the world.

Republicans in Congress shoulder more of the blame for the difficulties in reaching a debt ceiling agreement than President Obama and the Democrats, the poll found.

The Republicans compromised too little, a majority of those polled said. All told, 72 percent disapproved of the way Republicans in Congress handled the negotiations, while 66 percent disapproved of the way Democrats in Congress handled negotiations. The public was more evenly divided about how President Obama handled the debt ceiling negotiations: 47 percent disapproved and 46 percent approved.

The public’s opinion of the Tea Party movement has soured in the wake of the debt ceiling debate. The Tea Party is now viewed unfavorably by 40 percent of the public and favorably by just 20 percent, according to the poll. In mid-April only 29 percent of those polled viewed the movement unfavorably, while 26 percent viewed it favorably. And 43 percent of Americans now think the Tea Party has too much influence on the Republican Party, up from 27 percent in mid-April.

Buyers’ remorse.

Now, please remember this in November 2012.