Purple Poseur… Nothing brings on the rhetorical diarrhea quite like a space program.  The utterly doltish budgetary decision to sink billions, perhaps trillions, into the incompetent NASA sinkhole has launched a thousand flights of fancy (and that's probably all it will launch).  From defender of the booboisie James Lileks:

Whatever. Fact: In the middle of a war against medieval-minded foes, we decided that we should also head back into space. We’re not going to close the borders, curl up under the covers. The right hand holds the sword, the left hand holds the sextant.

Heading back into space sounds exactly like the attempt to escape the problems of earthbound reality that Lileks says it's not.  This along with the total collapse of immigration policy and scattershot proposals like spending $1.5 billion to promote marriage suggest an administration spiraling into Clintonian triviality.  Lileks is merely dressing up space pork in a quilt of militant clichés.

And when is Lileks' writing not a pile of comfortable, pop culture-derived clichés?  He made his name through comedic parasitism, in short leafing through old Better Homes & Gardens books from the 60s and making fun of them.  His site, in both its design and its writing style, is just more of the same tacky nostalgia for a past he never experienced.  He's fine if you keep him in his little niche, insufferable in every other context.

Warming up to his grandiosity, he continues:

I believe that this nation should put a man on the moon by the end of this decade and keep him there. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard and expensive and boring and lethal and just might – might – give people something to watch that’s more important than Paris Hilton pitching a fit because she chipped a nail.

Is there any point at all to this gaseous eruption?  He's so caught up in his own polemical excess (which he earlier breaks stride to admire) that he seems to be writing more or less blind – not unedited, just writing without thinking about the quality of his sentences and arguments.  Someone who is demanding that we spend a trillion dollars just to flush the money down the toilet as a merry distraction is too unserious for the zealous, dreamy tone Lileks falls back on for effect.  It's neither amusing nor reasonable.  To borrow his lame fixation on cultural bric-a-brac, it's the Velveeta cheese of punditry.

CityPages, an odious Twin Cities circular (Lileks lives in one of the area suburbs), has published a patchily argued hit piece on him which drew just enough blood for Lileks to splutter, "So: do you think the guy who wrote that article called up this site today, hoping he’d find a foamy-mouthed point-by-point reply?"  (Just to show 'em, Lileks blunders awkwardly around with his space dream enthusiasm for the rest of the Bleat.)

It's a pity that CityPages writer Dennis Perrin is so harmlessly inept.  ("Her utterances and observations captivate him, and he spreads heart on sleeve when illustrating this" – what a clunker.)  Lileks needs to be slapped around a bit.  More than a bit.  But the estimable Perrin has politics bleeding into his eyes and instead turns out a rote, smug criticism in that irritating Lefty Minnesota tone.  He goes on and on building up to Lileks' parental exhibitionism and by the time he finally squares his point about Lileks' lack of restraint he just uses it to make a bumbling hopscotch leap to the subject of Iraq.  Wherein he becomes just as predictable and smug as Lileks at his worst.

This is not an effective way to write a hatchet job.  The closest Perrin comes – and this is doubtless where he got in the blow that irritated Lileks – is when he points out Lileks' hypocritical bitching about the fatuous and smirky writing of Salam Pax.  (Even the pseudonym, retained now more as a brand than anything else, is a pose.)  This is well-spotted – one is the flip side of the other.  But Perrin can't keep it going and he is soon mired in self-contradictions:  He starts the piece whining that Lileks "reduces all lefties into an easily digestible stereotype" but is shortly thereafter making comfortable, sneering generalizations about "warbloggers", as he defines those who have argued in support of the invasion of Iraq.  It gives the whole piece a losing quality.

Yet the aim is worthwhile, even if its motive in Perrin's case is the same autoerotic tugging he sees in his target.  Lileks has reached the level of self-indulgence where he likes to talk about how self-indulgent he is.  His mind is so obsessed with personal minutiae that the meandering banalities in his Bleats resemble a march of ants.  At his worst he evokes Robin Williams' nerve-wracking stand-up act, in which stream-of-consciousness patter interrupts the jokes and itself with annoying indiscipline.  At his best he merely adds a laughtrack to stale cultural effluvia.  Perrin misses most of this or can't let it crowd in on his love of reminding people how "nuanced" his own thoughts on Iraq are (asserted but never demonstrated), which suggests that he actually lost the point of his own article.  Maybe there is something poetic about Lileks getting critiqued by this boob.

Like the title?  I mistakenly typed "Lilacs" for "Lileks" at one point and realized how fitting it was.  It must be dreadful to have to edit him.