I’ve been reading the Bleat for years now and he has gone further and further into the business of being a grumpy guy and less and less being an amusing commentator on culture. He had the sense to move a lot of it to a separate blog. But today he just lost it. It sounds to me like the rantings of an “old guy” who can’t take the notion that he is a complete square. He spends a lot of words trying to discount any sort of counter culture sensibility as being stupid and has a bad habit of justifying things by pointing out that much much worse things are happening elsewhere in the world. Sort of like “Why are the namby pamby Democrats so up in arms about the goverment spying on them without warrants when North Korea has 100,000 people being tortured to death in secret prisons?” “Why get so up in arms about blacks being kept out of good schools in the 50s when Russia was killing thousands of people every month in Gulags?” Sad. That’s not an argument. Mis-direction.

I read most of the Bleat today and over and over it was just saying, this guy is really a stiff neck jerk. “How dare you rebel against a country that feeds you, Marlon Brando and James Dean!” Lileks, you are a sad old guy. Mr. Unhip. And that seems to make you crazy. You need to start allowing people to reply to your rants on your site. Dialog.

Lileks takes great exception to an Ang Lee comment today and it just bugs me.

The first thing that comes to mind is very simple. Ang Lee has made a number of films and is the one actually capable of having the very qualified opinion he does. The second, and more crucial thing that hits me is that Mr. Lee’s statement is completely out of any context and without any way to know what exactly he means. Lileks takes the opportunity to tell us what Mr. Lee is saying. It’s senseless. Lileks knows no more about the context of the statement than you or I, but feels free to fill it out fully.

He has decided to harp on the word “free” and decided Ang Lee is talking about the state of “freedom” in the United States. That our ability to live our lives without our women being stoned to death for lack of head coverings means Ang Lee is a hoighty toighty egg head who has no right to assail our way of life.

It’s a very crass thing to take one sentence from an international film maker about his industry and tell the world that he is thus part of the liberal elite who would stab us in the back and feed us to terrorists. I don’t think we need to protect our borders and our Freedom from a prominent director who uses the word “free” in a negative statement about the US.

Lower your hackles Mr. Lileks. You are begining to see liberal elitests under every newspaper article.

I recall when I first came across Lileks’ site. I loved it. And then I wondered if people thought I was copying him. Well, I started my site completely independantly. Great minds…

He has posted Tennessee postcards now and has highlighted some places I have researched myself. Check out his images of TN HERE. Those cards of the Monteagle are awesome. Here are my pictures of it now. And the Admiral Benbow research is on my forums HERE. Sadly gone.