Blast from the past: the opening credits to “Eight is Enough,” starring Dick van Patten and Betty Buckley. I used to love this show.

Even though he’s a nutjob on gay issues, Ben Stein has written a terrific piece on why tax cuts are out of control.

Essentially, he points out the flaws in the tax-cutters’ arguments:

– Tax increases are not “class warfare,” because the rich already pay a smaller percentage of their taxes than other people do.

– Tax cuts do not increase revenue: revenues were higher in the Clinton era.

– History shows that it’s nearly impossible to cut government spending; government spending has risen almost every year since 1940.

– It’s ridiculous to say that deficits don’t matter. “[I]f it doesn’t matter, why bother to even discuss balancing the budget? Why have taxes at all? Why not just print money the way Weimar Germany did? Why not abolish taxes and add trillions to the deficit each year? Why don’t we all just drop acid, turn on, tune in and drop out of responsibility in the fiscal area? If deficits don’t matter, why not spend as much as we want, on anything we want?”

His conclusion:

People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren. I thought it was the conservative view that there should be some balance between income and outflow. When did this change?

Oh, now, now, now I recall. It changed when we figured that we could cut taxes and generate so much revenue that we would balance the budget. But isn’t that what doctors call magical thinking? Haven’t the facts proved that this theory, though charming and beguiling, was wrong?

I’ve decided I want to start cooking. But I need some advice on a good cookbook.

We rarely cook dinner; we usually order in or do takeout. I’ve decided I want to start saving money, expand our food horizons, and learn some good cooking skills. It seems like it would be fun.

I have some basic skills, because I used to cook for myself: I can sauté chicken and vegetables. I can make rice and pasta. I can cook vegetables by boiling them. I baked cookies once. That’s about it. To be honest, I’m a little intimidated by cooking. Also, I don’t want to go out and spend money on equipment and ingredients that I’ll never use. But I want to learn to become a better cook.

Regarding basic ingredients to keep in your kitchen, I’ve found this, this, this and this.

As for all-purpose cookbooks, I’ve looked at Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything, the Betty Crocker cookbook, the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook, and a little bit at The Joy of Cooking – the latter just came out in a new edition, but there are also some earlier editions and people seem to have different opinions of them. I don’t necessarily want a book filled with recipes I’ll never make – I’d rather have a book filled with recipes I will make.

Any ideas for cookbooks?

Oh, Google Earth, how I love thee. Someone has made a 3-D model of the buildings of Monroe Hill, a.k.a. Brown College, at the University of Virginia, where I lived for two years.

Here are Japanese versions of those Mac-vs.-PC ads.

I think MSNBC really went overboard with their “breaking news” updates on the Tom Cruise – Katie Holmes wedding.

The highlight of “The Simpsons” for me last night was when Michael Chabon, one of my favorite authors, got into a fistfight with Jonathan Franzen.

If you didn’t watch it, here’s a Simpsonized drawing of the two of them along with Tom Wolfe and Gore Vidal, who all appeared last night and did guest voices.

And did anyone catch the (non-voiced) appearances of John Updike and Thomas Pynchon? I assume it was Pynchon, since he had a bag over his head, just like in his prior (voiced) appearances.

Here’s a new foreward that Dave Eggers wrote for a new edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that was published last week.

I feel haunted by a book I finished reading today: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt. This is a massive book, published last year, that covers Europe’s history from the end of World War II, through the Cold War and the end of Communism, into the beginning of the new century.

It’s a great book – very long, over 800 pages, very exhaustive and insightful. But the book is not just a history of Europe – it’s a book that delves into the meaning of history of itself. Judt says that the remarkable comeback of Western Europe from the ashes of World War II required a massive exercise in forgetting.

In his introduction, he writes about the recent influx of Muslim immigrants:

This new presence of Europe’s living “others” – perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the EU as currently constituted, for example, with a further eighty million awaiting admission in Bulgaria and Turkey – has thrown into relief not just Europe’s current discomfort at the prospect of ever greater variety, but also the ease with which the dead “others” of Europe’s past were cast far out of mind. Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.

The Jews of Europe were largely eviscerated during the war, of course, and here are some actual numbers:

Of 126,000 Jews removed from Austria, 4,500 returned after the war. In the Netherlands, where there had been 140,000 Jews before the war, 110,000 were deported – of whom fewer than 5,000 returned. In France, of 76,000 (mostly foreign-born) Jews who were deported during the years 1940-44, less than 3 percent survived. Further east, the figures were even worse: of Poland’s pre-war population of over 3 million Jews, fully 97.5 percent were exterminated. In Germany itself, in May 1945, there remained just 21,450 of the country’s 600,000 Jews.

And the Jews were mostly not welcome even when they returned home. According the book, one Dutch Jewish survivor, Rita Koopman, was greeted thusly by one Dutch citizen upon her return to her home country: “Quite a lot of you came back. Just be happy you weren’t here – how we suffered from hunger!”

Much of Europe was either complicit in what happened to the Jews or at least managed to bury the memories of what had happened to them. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when a new generation started to grow up, that people really started to talk about it again. This accelerated after the end of the Cold War. The 45 years of the Cold War are no longer seen as a permanent state of affairs, as they were at the time; instead, they were an extraordinarily long parenthesis that kept Europe from processing what it had just gone through during the war. It was not until Communism fell apart and history returned that Europe could truly begin to address its past with clear eyes.

The way the book presents this is what I found most haunting. The last few chapters of the book talk about post Cold-War Europe, how the Eastern European nations started to build up their economies, how the European Union solidified and expanded, how Europe has become a modern, generally peaceful place. It’s a note of optimism.

And then, after all the optimism, is an epilogue – “From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory.”

Even if you don’t read the entire book, you should stop into a bookstore or library and read the epilogue.

It is the epilogue that offers the above numbers of Europe’s Jewish dead. Not only Jews were killed during the war in Europe, of course, and the 45 years of the Cold War left many more people dead – not to mention the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The epilogue acknowledges this. In fact, while it is specifically about the lost Jews, it is more generally an essay on how to deal with the collective memory of a painful past.

Judt’s point is this: while it’s great that so many memorials and museums to the dead have been built in recent years, they are not enough. “[T]o memorialize the past in edifices and museums is also a way to contain and even neglect it – leaving the responsibility of memory to others.” But people who lived through those times are dying every day; “the cycle of active memory is closing.”

More important than memory – because it’s more accurate than memory – is history. “Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive.” But it needs to be learned.

If this were being portrayed cinematically, you would see a big, bustling, multicultural and cosmopolitan European city: people hurrying about, talking noisy into cellphones in numerous languages, hopping onto high-speed trains with their newspapers and Blackberries.

And then we zoom out from the city, and we zoom in on a desolate field, filled with gravesites marking the dead.

The quiet, long-forgotten dead.

The epilogue’s, and the book’s, final paragraph reads as follows, and it left me reeling.

If in years to come we are to remember why it seemed so important to build a certain sort of Europe out of the crematoria of Auschwitz, only history can help us. The new Europe, bound by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past. If Europeans are to maintain this vital link – if Europe’s past is to continue to furnish Europe’s present with admonitory meaning and moral purpose – then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation. “European Union” may be a response to history, but it can never be a substitute.

From the Wikipedia category American cultural conventions:

The buttered cat paradox.

The five-second rule.

Punch buggy.

Ah, the joy of being human.

Blast from the past: Wendy’s commercial from the 1980s, Cold-War-style. “Is next… daywear!”

Congratulations to Gerald Ford, who today becomes the oldest person ever to have served as President of the United States. As usual, Wikipedia is on it.

(Notw: It’s hard to figure out how to phrase this accomplishment. He’s not the “oldest U.S. president ever,” because that implies he was the oldest president while he served in office. But a few people have him beat on that. He is the “oldest ex-U.S. president ever,” but that understates the accomplishment; it implies that there could have been, say, a president who died in office at age 95; he/she would have been older than Gerald Ford but never got to be an ex-president because he/she died in office. Yay, nitpicking!)

This is weird, I know, but I just enjoy the parallel nature of Wednesday’s and Friday’s New York Times front pages:

On Donald Rumsfeld’s public persona these last few years:

“It was a wonderful mixture of arrogance and ‘Aunt Harriet’ language” like goodness gracious, Trillin says. “I don’t think anybody can match that.”

For some reason this made me laugh out loud.

This is why I could never work in marketing.

“We found that Brooklyners like to eat their pizza differently,” said Dana Harville, a spokeswoman for Domino’s. “They like floppy, large slices, and they fold them into almost a sandwich.”

But that’s no different from the way thousands of people in any of the other boroughs eat a slice. So why call it Brooklyn Style as opposed to, say, Staten Island Style?

“Brooklyn has such a big personality,” she said. “It’s a little different than the Manhattan-style personality. We’re really having a lot of fun with the culture.”

I could never be a marketing spokesperson, because I could never say something like, “Brooklyn has such a big personality. It’s a little different than the Manhattan-style personality. We’re really having a lot of fun with the culture.”

Ugh.

As part of the marketing of that culture, Domino’s has started a couple of contests. One is a drawing for a vintage New York taxi, even though everyone knows it’s almost impossible to hail a cab in Brooklyn.

The rest of the marketing blitz rests on television ads and on a Web site […] which features characters purchased at the Brooklyn Stereotype Store.

An older Italian woman yells out of a brownstone window. A man with the look of an extra from “The Sopranos” pumps iron on the roof. A Rosie O’Donnell lookalike berates a taxi driver for not folding his slice like a man. And there’s an African-American guy. You can’t hear what he’s saying because the rap music pouring from his car speakers is too loud.

That kind of imagery just grinds at Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president.

“It’s a multinational right-wing company, mass marketing the Brooklyn attitude with obsolete ethnic stereotypes, not to mention flimsy crusts,” he said through a spokesman.

I repeat, ugh.

It feels good to win.

With the Democrats retaking the House, it feels like the natural order of things has been restored. Of course, no party is entitled to a house of Congress, but the Dems did control it for 40 years. It feels like it should be theirs. Bill Clinton probably feels vindicated, since he’s the one who lost Congress in the first place.

I’m usually a channel flipper on election night, but not this year: for some reason I found myself transfixed by Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, a channel I rarely watch. I can’t look at Chris Matthews without seeing Darrell Hammond.

Some tidbits:

* Not a single Democratic incumbent was defeated last night in a House, Senate or governor’s race – “an unprecedented event since the advent of universal suffrage.” [link]

* The new Senate will have the highest number of women ever: 16. That’s still about 40 seats short of what it should be, but given that there were only 2 sitting female senators as late as 1992, it’s still progress, however slow.

* For the first time, a proposed constitutional amendment to ban any form of legal recognition for same-sex couples was defeated. This happened in Arizona. Also: “Anti-marriage amendments were on the ballot in eight states and were approved in seven of the eight, but by significantly lower margins than in past years.” That’s called looking at the bright side, I guess, but it’s still progress in the long term. [link]

* Democrats now control more governships. More Democratic governors = more potential Democratic presidential candidates in the future.

* “With moderates in the Northeast falling, the Republican conference will grow more conservative.” Also: “The complexion of the Democratic presence in Congress will change as well. Party politics will be shaped by the resurgence of ‘Blue Dog’ Democrats, who come mainly from the South and from rural districts in the Midwest and often vote like Republicans.” [link]

* New visual for (at least) the next two years: Nancy Pelosi sitting on the dais behind the president during the State of the Union address. The first woman to sit there.

Who knows what the future will bring? Complications will likely arise. Politics is politics.

I’m just glad that the horrible 109th Congress will soon be history. No more Terri Schiavo, no more flag-burning amendment, no more Federal Marriage Amendment, no more Dennis Hastert.

It feels good to win.

Cyber-Neologoliferation: The Internet has exponentially increased the number of new words that appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Last April, a man tried to jump off the Empire State Building with a parachute before security guards stopped him.

This story contains my favorite exchange of quotations in today’s paper.

“This gentleman, I maintain, is an artist and has freedom of expression,” Mr. Heller [the man’s lawyer] said. “His art is not with pen or music; his art is with his body movement.”

Officials from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office declined to comment, save for one who muttered, “I wouldn’t want his freedom of expression to land on my head.”

It’s about damn time.