Bring Your Own Boston Legal.

Today's entry, in which I make a realization about the full implications of Chicago's BYOB policy and diagnose a major problem of American culture, and propose Boston Legal as the remedy.

BYOB You always perfect something once you no longer do it. I'm leaving Chicago in two weeks, and I just figured this out. Chicago has a great Bring Your Own Bottle restaurant scene, but it wasn't until last week that I understand it. For years BYOB was an excuse to make a (usually lame) dinner date cheaper. Boring conversations with someone you barely know over dinner - about the worst possible way of getting to know someone - were made more sensible by not having to purchase a $50 bottle of wine with your meal.

That's worthwhile, to a degree. But it misses the genius. A friend and I were eating the works of the rotisserie savants over at Feed, when someone he knew entered. That person pulled out a plastic bag filled with Budweiser and said: "Do you guys want a beer?" My mind immediately was hit with a flashbolt - you mean all those years of eating at small BYOB taco places, rib shacks, and chicken huts and I could have been bringing beer to drink? Oh my god.

To test this theory we went to what might be the best rib place in Chicago, Honey 1's BBQ, a restaurant that I am shamed to say I have thought: "Why is that BYOB? You wouldn't bring a bottle of wine there", carrying a plastic bag filled with cans of Old Style. Two of us, bag filled with Old Style. Sure enough, he took our order (tips, my god the tips there), looked at our closed bag, and winked "I see you guys have your own drinks."

We then spent the next two hours eating ribs and drinking beer. Total price of beer consumed: $3.49. God bless you Mayor Daley.

Culture I think one of the major problems with mass American culture is that so much energy is put into presenting the professional class doing a great job of itself. How many television shows or movies can you name where doctors are brilliant and not at all bound by time or money, lawyers ethical and dedicated to their client no matter what, and so on with teachers, journalists, etc. I can't tell if this is the result of : trying to reassure a country that has handed off functional control of their lives to 10% of the population that they have made a wise choice; hitting that sweet spot of loving pratical knowledge existing in the pursuit of authority, respect, money and power (of which the characters always implicitly have or deserve); or just a benign career day for a country of immigrants where there is no inherited trade culture.

(Before I move on from this, I'll disclose my opinions of the various subgenres. I think the Journalists Speak Truth to Power is the most boring; I have a soft spot for Doctors Spend Most of Their Time Not Haggling With HMOs genre - so many of my friends ran off to medical school after the first two seasons of ER. I feel bad for people who bought into the Lawyers as justice-seekers - man are they up for a rude awakening. And I always think the Teacher Motivates Inner-City Schoolchildren subgenre is the most absurd, because it usually plays out this odd middle-class suburban fantasy of The Problem As Lazy Teachers, and if only someone would come in and really teach calculus to the children, with passion and dedication, all the problems would melt away. Being a math kid, the idea that some staple of Calc AB like the chain rule would be all that is needed to get kids to believe in themselves, and that only would overcome extreme poverty, is so silly only people in Naperville could believe it. I love that post No Child Left Behind it doesn't even have to be a subject that's taught - just believing in kids enough to teach them dancing will be enough.)

Boston Legal Which brings me to Boston Legal, Season 2. What a wonderful show. There is absolutely no pretense that lawyers are serious creatures, seekers of truth and justice. And they do it without being brutal about it - without showing what life would actually be like at the top firm of Boston, ie 80 hour weeks helping company A sue company B (they do hint at it with a wonderful subplot about the sandwich lady being more respected than a new associate). Instead the lawyers are treated as they are - hired guns. The camera does weird things when the characters enter rooms and courthouses - it's an odd blend of Reservoir Dogs and Sergio Leone, gangsters and cowboys.

A lot has been made of the shows left-leaning politics, and perhaps it is a big deal for network television. But for me the glee of the show comes down to three things. One is that the casework is almost never stuff a large corporation would actually handle. Michael McKean sleeps with a cow and the top firm helps his divorce case. Ed Bagley Jr. sleeps with hookers and the top firm handles the charge. Alberto Gonzalez (offcamera, of course), needs the best lawyer in the country to defend the Department of Justice (the next day, incidentally) and calls William Shatner. James Spader spends a large number of episodes defending his various secretaries from criminal charges or doing public aid work. It is so not at all how big firm life would go it is a wonder to watch.

The second is that while the show leans left, it's really about power - and who has it. A big subplot in Season 2 is that William Shatner started going around shooting people (just the fact that I can write such a statement...). The homeless, defendants, his therapist. All shot. And Shatner always walks in a way that is not at all unconvincing. Spader gets an odd fellow off from multiple murders he committed in different episodes. Another lawyers gets away with chopping the fingers off a priest. The lawyers are always defending the most questionable of cases and clients, and almost-always winning from bringing the better minds, money, and hired guns to the table.

power, and road trips

But the politics and law stuff really misses the third and best part of the show - male bonding. Season 2 of Boston Legal, and there is no other way to put it, has been about Shatner and Spader going on road trips together. To get over heartaches or neurological disorders or being "in heat" - they have spent a large part of the show not being lawyers but instead guys traveling to Canada, LA, spas, etc. These scenes, as well as any other number that involves flamingos and ballroom dancing and them defending each other in a court of law, are what gives the show its real strength and heart. And not enough can be said about these characters. James Spader plays a weird amalgamation of all his previous stock characters: creepy, anti-social with a hint (or not just a hint) of sexual deviancy (Secretary, Crash, Mannequin), while William Shatner plays Shanter!, a weird hyped-up insane (or is it mad-cow?) version of his own celebrity persona.

And I said it before, and I'll say it again, those final scenes on the balcony are worth re-watching a few times. It ties everything together in a nice touch without ever feeling trite. To next season, gentlemen.

GETTING IMMIGRANTS OFF TO A GOOD START

The average American couldn't name the five rights guaranteed by the 1st Amendment if you held a gun to his or her head. Those who seek to become naturalized citizens should be no different. The following is a real flash card offered as a study aid for those taking the "citizenship test" through the INS:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're missing one. Or maybe the omission isn't an accident. Freedom of the press has really been a pain in the President's ass lately, and his last six years in office have already made clear his power to edit the Constitution at will.

PAT BUCHANAN: VISIONARY

I've always liked Pat Buchanan. He's honest, and he doesn't varnish his loathing for various segments of the population under the cloak of "compassionate conservatism" or any such nonsense. Personally, I'd much rather end up with a guy who says "No, really, I don't like gays" than a guy who pretends he does and then screws them every chance he gets once in office.

"No, put the flag behind me, lest anyone question my allegiances."

The second reason I like him is that for the longest time (pre-Stockdale) he was pretty much the only entertainment in presidential elections. You could always count on ol' Pat for a couple of gold nuggets. In 1992, he challenged and defeated incumbent President G.H. Bush in the New Hampshire primaries. Then he went on to sink the latter's campaign by insisting on a keynote address at the 1992 GOP convention in which he used phrases like "moral jihad" to describe the party's mission to "govern by the Bible." Safe to say that scared the living shit out of about 70% of the voting public. Molly Ivins described Buchanan's speech as "Decent. But I liked it better in the original German."

Fourteen years later, and suddenly Pat appears to have been A) a prophet and B) a religious moderate compared to those who would follow in his footsteps.

But his progressive ideas didn't stop there. In 1996 part of his campaign centered around the idea of building a giant fence between the U.S. and Mexico. Boy, that was good for a yuk! Ha ha ha! That Pat Buchanan, he sure is a cut-up. I mean, he was alive when the Maginot Line was built! Surely he knew better.

Fast forward to 2006 and our current intellectually handicapped GOP: "No, seriously, build the fucking fence." And who can blame them. The logic is flawless. Once the border is demarcated by a steel fence, illegal immigration will become impossible. I can't think of any way to get past a fence, can you? Didn't think so.

This is emblematic of why the current generation of conservatives are such an utter embarassment. The ideas that used to be offered up by fringe lunatics - Buchanan's fence, the national sales tax, Forbes-o-nomics - are now part and parcel of the majority ideology. Star Wars/SDI, which Reagan used as a bluff (since it's technologically impossible) to convince a teetering Soviet Union that it couldn't afford the next stage in the arms race, was revived in 2002 as "national missile defense." How's that project coming along, guys? Another couple hundred billion and you might even have a prototype that works under heavily rigged testing conditions!

If this trend continues (and since the GOP has anointed itself God's chosen people, how could it not?) I look forward to a reintroduction of more ideas mined from the rich intellectual history of bat-shit insane ultra-right conservatism. Ketchup may once again be a vegetable, and we have but scratched the surface of the visionary foreign affairs insights of Barry Goldwater.