NOTES FROM THE SURFACE

James Wolcott puts it aptly in LIPSTICK FASCISM: "Conservatism and sadism have become indivisible." (The stimulus is Ann Coulter's comment in re: Gannon/Guckert: "Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president.") Meantime, Bob Herbert reminds us this morning in his column: "It's Called Torture."

I'm a great admirer of Louis Menand's take on things -- usually. This morning I'm not so crazy about his lukewarm take on Hunter S. Thompson in the New Yorker, but I can live with it. Not so with Stephen Schwartz's hatchet job in The Weekly Standard, which is something else entirely. It concludes: Thompson "was flattered to be described as chronicler of 'the death of the American dream.' In reality, he described a nightmare from which America awoke years ago."

Well, Schwartz must still be having nightmares. I remember him as a teenage freak who used to come into the City Lights Bookstore in 1966 and '67, spouting Surrealist doctrine and declaring himself the San Francisco incarnation of a Surrealist movement that didn't exist. His freakishness consisted of a three-piece suit, not some hippie garb, the intense babble of an academic proselyte and a self-regard bordering on the autistic. (He eventually converted to Sufism.) He was wrong then. He's wrong now. And my bet is he'll always be wrong.

Postscript: If you cared about last night's Oscars show, here's why you shouldn't have.