Three of the most interesting hours of my life were spent in the company of Henry Bromell, who died the other day at the age of 65. Henry was a writer–of short stories and television scripts mostly, but also of an also of a novel and of screenplays. Ann Kolson had assigned me to write a piece on him for The New York Times; the occasion was his debut as a film director for a film called Panic, about a hitman, for which he had also written the screenplay. We met him at the Algonquin Hotel–the only interview I’ve ever conducted there–and I liked him immediately. Easy-going, friendly, funny, interested, smart–he was anything other than self-absorbed. We talked for literally three hours, which was about three times the amount of time usually required to complete the assignment. Although I was careful to cover the usual bases that needed for my assignment, the encounter wasn’t like an interview at all, but more just a delightful conversation. We talked about film, books, writing, his interesting upbringing, about Homicide: Life on the Streets (where had had performed distinguished work and which was one of my favorite series.) It was just an enormously enjoyable experience, with no sense of the professional wall that typically exists between subject and interviewer. I was thrilled to see that he had achieved recent success with Homeland; that was arena he knew well from his upbringing in the Middle East as the son of a CIA operative. I’m glad that he capped his career with success.

Here are a couple of Henry’s quotes from the piece:

”My editor says I’m the only person she knows who’s written for television that television has made a better writer,” said Mr. Bromell, pointing out that writing for David Chase, who was the executive producer of ”I’ll Fly Away” and is the executive producer of ”The Sopranos,” was the most rigorous experience of his career. ”He thinks in terms of a page and a half or two pages, and within that time, there should be two turns, two times where the scene goes someplace that you didn’t see coming, that’s real and is believable. And he’s a Chekovian, so for him the whole scene has to have a subtext. Even if it’s not mentioned, you’ve got to feel it and understand it. Really tough stuff. But you get excited by what he says, because you see that he’s made it better.”

Reaction to ”Panic” has been positive; Mr. Bromell seems particularly pleased by friends who’ve told him that he has made a European movie. ”Most of the filmmakers I love are Europeans,” he says, enumerating a catalog of favorites that quickly begins to include directors from Japan, India and America but that leaves out most of today’s Hollywood filmmakers.

”Working on the series, we would get as production assistant these very bright kids from U.S.C. film school and N.Y.U. film school who begin each day asking what would be entertaining for the greatest number of people. Not, ‘What if I take that character and put him in a room with that character?’ Now they think like agents and producers. They’re very comfortable servicing corporate culture. They don’t see as their fundamental role being critical or making people laugh in a way they’re not used to laughing.
They think, ‘All right, we got to bring in 30 million people, how are we going to do this?’ I think, ‘If all we’re going to do is serve corporate culture, where are our ideas going to come from?’ ”

Having spent all that (mostly enjoyable) time in graduate school reading The Prince, I was delighted to see that Professor Stephen J. Milner of the University of Manchester has discovered the arrest warrant for Niccolò Machiavelli hidden away in a state archive. The 500-years-old document was the catalyst for Machiavelli’s writing The Prince. When the Medici family returned to power in Florence in 1512, chiavelli was booted out of his post in the city’s chancery He was later linked to a conspiracy to overthrow the returning rulers, and this warrant for his arrest was issued in 1513. “On the same day, he was imprisoned, tortured and later released and placed under house arrest outside the city,” Milner told The Telegraph, “The Prince was written in the vain hope of gaining favor and employment with the Medici — but there’s no evidence to suggest they even read it.”

Over the last twenty years or so, you could talk with people about great political books, like Game Change or what have you, and then somebody would remember that Richard Ben Cramer had written What It Takes, and that ended the conversation. None was better, and none would ever be better. Working on a big canvas-his topic was the presidential election of 1988, and in the 1000-plus pages that the book ran, Cramer covered six of the candidates in depth, including George Bush, Bob Dole and Joe Biden–Cramer took anything and everything there was to learn from the Making of the President books of Theodore H. White, the brilliant political writing of Norman Mailer, and the exhaustive, energetic journalism of Tom Wolfe, and added to it his own prodigious intellect and talent. Richard was a patient journalist who never forced or rushed his story. He was also that rarest of writers, one who actually liked people, and allowed his subjects to show their best sides to the reader without shying away from foibles and follies and utter ridiculousness of being a high elected official. The result was something far better than anything of its kind–insightful, sympathetic, gimlet-eyed, hilarious. You could watch a hundred episodes of Veep and not laugh as hard as you will reading a two-page account of George W. Bush, son of the THEN-vice-president, realizing that a White House staffer had been given seats at a baseball game at the Houston Astrodome that were much closer to his father than his. Here’s Richard, inside the mind of a smoldering future president:

“Junior was now standing. . .watching to see who sat behind Barbara Bush and the seat reserved for his father. There was Jeb, and his boy P. They got seats with the old man. . . Wait a minute! There was Fuller, the new Chief of Staff, and one of his paper-pushers. Are they sitting DOWN? Well, wait just a goddam minute! Fuller! There he was, with every damn oily hair in place, and his Washington suit stretched across his back like aluminum siding. . . .Tell you one thing: that sonovabitch doesn’t know the old man, if he thinks he can move family out. The old friends were right. This guy’s an asshole! I’ve been replaced by STAFFERS!”

It kills me today to read in Richard’s obituary in The New York Times that “What It Takes received poor reviews, and sales were initially poor. Fellow journalists were also slow to see its value. Disappointed, Mr. Cramer never again wrote as prodigiously about politics.” I hadn’t known about the poor reviews and sales. Perhaps the sheer length of the thing discouraged readers. The one time I met him, in the offices of Esquire in 1994, I gushed about the book, telling him that I had read every word. He said, “You’re the only person who has ever told me that.” I took him to be joking. Now I wonder how much.

Richard went out to lunch with my fellow editor David Hirshey that day, and when he came back, he was making his good-byes, and he said to me, “There was something I wanted to tell you.” He punctuated the phrase with finger wags: “There was something I wanted to tell you.” I was thrilled–flattered, even. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember. I later made a couple discreet queries through Hirshey to see if Richard may have remembered, but nothing had clicked, and I could see I was becoming a pest.

What could it have been? Stop wasting your time? Buy Apple? Lose twenty pounds? A wet bird never flies at night?

Oh well. Such was my encounter with one of the giants of my era.

This year that is fast disappearing will not be remembered in these quarters with very much warmth. It was a fairly hideous, sickening year, the year that I felt I got old. But like all good things, the bad ones come to an end as well, and thanks to some much appreciated end of the year action by Richard Plepler, Steve Koepp, David McCormick and others, we begin 2013 on an upswing, and with hopes for better times to come. In the meanwhile, here are some jewels, personally chosen and wholly idiosyncratic, recovered from 2012:
1.) Love for Levon. Without a doubt, everything about the tribute concert to Levon Helm–reporting the story, meeting the people involved, attending the event, the reception to the article, what may happen yet–turned this into the best thing that I was involved with this year.
2.) Searching for Sugarman. This modest documentary about a real-life Cinderella made my heart leap with joy. A very inspirational story.
3.) Call Me Maybe. Carly Rae Jepson‘s unassuming, sweet, girlish, flirty hit was attractive enough, but the way it went viral and enveloped everyone from the US Olympic Swim Team to Colin Powell was delightful. The song never failed to bring a smile to my lips, especially in Jepson’s collaboration with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots.
4.) The dauntless, rain-drenched performance of the young people of Royal College of Music Chamber Choir during the flotilla of the Queen’s Jubilee was simply stirring, especially when they sang “Land of Hope and Glory.”
5.) The presidential campaign as a whole this year was a fairly tedious affair, but the rousing Democratic convention, driven by one splendid speech after another culminating in Bill Clinton‘s masterful dissection/deconstruction/destruction of the GOP position was fairly brilliant, just as the Republicans’ ceaseless rhetorical self-destruction–“Oops”, “Nine, nine, nine”, “I like to fire people”, “legitimate rape”, “the 47 percent”–was the best long-running comedy series on TV.
6.) The Giants Win the Super Bowl. Just as in 2009, the inconsistent Giants managed to win four–or in this case, six–games that they could win but were not likely to, and managed, one play at a time, to walk off with the hardware.
7.) The Hour. A splendid, sophisticated, intelligent BBC series about a ground-breaking TV news magazine being produced in the early fifties. I love the way they can combine news judgment, inside baseball, and messy personal situations. Dominic West, Ben Whislaw and Romola Garai are just terrific. We also liked the posh Downton Abbey and the relentlessly vulgar The In-Betweeners. (I must say, I haven’t seen Homeland yet.
8.) Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel. Having loved Wolf Hall, I feared its sequel would suffer by comparison. I shouldn’t have worried. Other enjoyable books this year: Watergate, by Thomas Mallon; Passage of Power, by Robert Caro; The Long Road to Antietam, by Richard Slotkin.
9.) I went to Lincoln fearing a Spielbergian historical romance, full of longing gazes and quivering lips and swirling strings. But while there was some of that, it wasn’t enough to sicken the whole deal. I give total credit to screenwriter Tony Kushner for his decision to hang this pageant on a moment that has been largely overlooked by historians, the passage by the House of Representatives of a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery. Historians undercut the importance of that moment because there were other ways to accomplish Lincoln’s end, but that’s not the point: whether or not the vote had significant is irrelevant, it is a perfectly splendid motor for an historical drama.
10. Superstorm Sandy. “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result,” Winston Churchill once said. I have no reason to dispute him, but I can tell you this: it’s a humbling thing to realize that the killer hurricane has come and gone and that you’ve been missed.

On this, the 150th anniversary of the battle of Antietam, which, thank God, has not yet been replaced as the bloodiest day in American history, please allow me to recommend a new history of the battle, Richard Slotkin‘s The Long Road to Antietam. As the title suggests, the book is about much more than the battle, but about how the war changed in 1862, after both sides woke up to the fact that this would not be a short rumble but a prolonged and challenging struggle. In the south, this meant evolving a victory strategy of invasion; in the north, more dramatically, it involved a prolonged struggle between Lincoln and his generals, principally George McClellan, as well as the lengthy decision to win the war by emancipating the slaves. Slotkin does a wonderful job of showing how emancipation grew not from a moral conviction, but from a growing understanding of Lincoln’s presidential power as commander-in-chief. Where Slotkin really shines, however, is in his portrayal of McClellan, a man as opposed to abolition as he is to secession, and who conducted a mild war designed to promote a stalemate that would see his elevation as a Julius Caesar-type dictator who would save the nation. It’s hard enough, in writing history, to capture what really happened, but it’s sheer brilliant to be able to bring out what people were really thinking while it happened. We forget what a young country America was in 1862; we forget that the Constitution was untested and that everything was up for grabs. Many previous civil wars had ended up with the country entrusted to a military dictator–Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon. That was always the shadow play behind his relationship with Lincoln, and Slotkin does an amazing job of showing all these threads came together and ultimately reached their bloody resolution in western Maryland 150 years ago today.

. . .so far, anyway, has appeared in The American Conservative. It is called “Revolt of the Rich,”and it is by by Mike Lofgren, who spent 16 years as a Republican staffer on House and Senate Budget Committees. In the article, he makes a case that very few other Republicans are willing to advocate: not only is wealth not the be-all and end-all of existence, but it is actually a pernicious and corrupting force. In the article, Lofgren calls the super rich “the new secessionists,” by which he does “not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state. . . withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.” And, as Lofgren argues, this separatism causes the super rich to be antagonistic, if not downright hostile, to any government programs that try to sustain or support those who live in the country of the less well off.

But they don’t stop with hostility; “The objective of the predatory super-rich and their political handmaidens is to discredit and destroy the traditional nation state and auction its resources to themselves.”

“After the 2008 collapse,” write Lofgren, “the rich, rather than having the modesty to temper their demands, this time have made the calculated bet that they are politically invulnerable—Wall Street moguls angrily and successfully rejected executive-compensation limits even for banks that had been bailed out by taxpayer funds.” With the Supreme Court removing “the last constraints on the legalized corruption of politicians” and with the American standard of living falling at the fastest rate in decades, conservatives face disturbing questions. “Almost all conservatives who care to vote congregate in the Republican Party. But Republican ideology celebrates outsourcing, globalization, and takeovers as the glorious fruits of capitalism’s “creative destruction.” As a former Republican congressional staff member, I saw for myself how GOP proponents of globalized vulture capitalism, such as Grover Norquist, Dick Armey, Phil Gramm, and Lawrence Kudlow, extolled the offshoring and financialization process as an unalloyed benefit. They were quick to denounce as socialism any attempt to mitigate its impact on society. Yet their ideology is nothing more than an upside-down utopianism, an absolutist twin of Marxism. If millions of people’s interests get damaged in the process of implementing their ideology, it is a necessary outcome of scientific laws of economics that must never be tampered with, just as Lenin believed that his version of materialist laws were final and inexorable.

“If a morally acceptable American conservatism is ever to extricate itself from a pseudo-scientific inverted Marxist economic theory, it must grasp that order, tradition, and stability are not coterminous with an uncritical worship of the Almighty Dollar, nor with obeisance to the demands of the wealthy. Conservatives need to think about the world they want: do they really desire a social Darwinist dystopia?”

Many people on the left have been offering this kind of critique, but I’m not aware of other conservatives who have been willing to advance the heretical idea that the drunken binge of marketism that has governed our politics for more than three decades needs to ratcheted back. Three cheers for Lofgren for stating so emphatically that the right’s addiction to money is destroying the country.

Lofgren’s article, no doubt, is from his new book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, which I am going to buy right now. I will be curious to see how much he makes of this Old?New Secessionists comparison. I think there is quite a bit there. Many of the Old Secessionists were super rich as well, and many put their wealth and their lifestyle above the good of the country.

(First published in The Washington Monthly)

Killing the Poormaster, the new book by Holly Metz, brings vividly to life 1930s Hoboken, New Jersey, making it easy to envision classic brownstones with street vendors, milk trucks, and boys in knickers in the same neighborhoods now filled with stockbrokers and hipsters. The book’s great achievement, however, is to take us inside the walls of those houses, to place us among suffering people, mostly ignored in their time and all but invisible to us today, and to disturb us about their condition.

The Hoboken of the 1930s is as lost to us as the nineteenth-century whaling villages of Nantucket. (This is illustrated by the book’s title, which demonstrates that we are visiting a time before the invention of euphemisms.) Today, people with very low incomes are in general entitled to receive a variety of government benefits, from food stamps to housing vouchers to Medicaid. But in the early twentieth century, in Hoboken, the indigent received funds, intermittently and begrudgingly, from the city’s poormaster, a title that implicitly suggests a master-slave or master-servant relationship. In 1938, as Roosevelt’s premature budget cutting refueled the Depression, Hoboken’s poormaster was seventy-four-year-old Harry Barck, who managed his office’s $3,000-a-month budget with a tight fist and a surly temperament. A big, bluff, irascible organization man, Barck—with his dismayingly apt Dickensian name—had held that office for forty-two years, through five political bosses and eight mayors. Barck was unchallenged in his administration of the funds, as his decisions about who got welfare and how much they received knew no appeal. For decades, the work performed by poormasters in New Jersey was administered at the state level. But with the Depression straining the state budget, power had devolved back to the cities, and Barck grabbed the opportunity. Armed with sharp disdain for “chiselers” and with statements like “I’m in favor of giving the old American pioneer spirit a chance to assert itself,” he zealously guarded the city’s coffers. At a time when Union City, a comparably sized town in the very same county (58,659 residents to Hoboken’s 59,261), was spending $6.34 per capita on relief, Hoboken was spending 90 cents.

To read the rest of the review, click here.)

(first published in The American Prospect)

The venerable publishing house Scribner recently published a new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel A Farewell to Arms, complete with all the many endings the author rejected. “I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied”, he told The Paris Review. Given a little more time, here’s 39 more that Papa might have tossed into the wastebasket.

I.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. That’s our book for tonight. You’ve been a great audience. Drive home safely.

II.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. The waiter brought me a plate of onion rings, and then everything went black.

III.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Blah-de-blah, blah-de-blah, blah-de-blah blah blah.

IV.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. I got there just in time to see the big right-hander hit a three-run homer. “The Giants win the pennant!’’ I said. “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!’’

V.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. Osgood was there. “I have to level with you,’’ I told him. “I’m a man.’’ He shrugged. Nobody’s perfect, he replied.

VI.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. As if! LMFAO

VII.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. Lennie was waiting in the lobby. He asked me to tell him about the rabbits again. I started to, but then I shot him.

VIII.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. I am a rock. I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.

IX.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain, where I saw Ilsa. “If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not on it, you’ll regret it”, I told her. But all she wanted to know was how this would affect us. Us? This chick is delusional. There hadn’t been an us in years. “Hey”, I told her, “We’ll always have Paris.” And she bought it!

(See the rest here.)

Gore Vidal, the eminent man of letters, died last week at 86. In the splendid obituary that appeared in The New York Times, Charles McGrath wrote “ Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent. He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of stylish, magisterial essays. He also wrote plays, television dramas and screenplays. For a while he was even a contract writer at MGM. And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment aphorism, put-down or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy. Perhaps more than any other American writer except Norman Mailer or Truman Capote, Mr. Vidal took great pleasure in being a public figure. He twice ran for office — in 1960, when he was the Democratic Congressional candidate for the 29th District in upstate New York, and in 1982, when he campaigned in California for a seat in the Senate — and though he lost both times, he often conducted himself as a sort of unelected shadow president. He once said, “There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

The thing that was valuable about Vidal is that he always saw through the natural inclination of people to make nice. He never succumbed to the reflexive patriotism, the willingness to go along, the desire to back a winner, and he was always ready to recognize the smallness, the fear, and the selfishness that seldom lurks very far from the surface in most people. Maybe he was too ready to recognize those traits. “He was not a sentimentalist or a romantic,” wrote McGrath, who then quoted Vidal as saying “Love is not my bag.” On another occasion, Vidal said “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

If so, then how terribly sad for him. Still, it was always helpful to turn to him for a reality check. He was a great puncturer of illusions; he knew that inside most Gucci loafers, there were feet of clay. He knew that American Exceptionalism has always sat cheek by jowl with Pathetically Disappointing American Ordinariness.

I had the great luck on day in April 2006 to be hanging out in the late, lamented Borders bookstore in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, when Vidal suddenly appeared. He was in town to receive the Borders PEN Award, and I guess as part of the honor, he had to make a store appearance. It was a shock to see him being wheeled in, and a tremedous treat–a kind of a bonus for hanging out in bookstores–to see him in person. Here are some of his remarks:

“I’m getting an award tonight. It’s one of those ‘Still Breathing’ awards. They look around and say ‘Oh look—he’s still breathing.’’”

“This appearance has been advertised as a reading, but it’s not. I find writing books hard enough. I’ll leave the reading to others.”

“I spoke to [Democratic presidential candidate and member of the House] Dennis Kucinich. I liked him. He’d been talking of impeaching the president. I said ‘Don’t do that. Impeach the vice president. We’ve never had one like him before—a rogue vice president.”

“In the old days, when you had a group like this running things, we would have an election and get rid of them. Now we have an election, and Diebold withholds the results. But we need to get this group out. O-U-T, as I say to my dog.”

“I’m not a conspiracy theorist—I’m a conspiracy analyst. But even if I was inclined to suspect that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks, I’d discount the idea. They’re just not capable. They couldn’t pull it off.”

“From George Washington to George W. Bush—it leads me to believe that Darwin had it wrong.”

“The Bill of Rights has been eviscerated by the Patriot Act. Habeus corpus is the only good thing the British left us, and we gave it up, without a voice raised in protest.”

In a great public service, The Daily Beast collected Vidal’s best lines:

On Sex:

“I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”

“Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.”

“There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.”

On Envy:

“Envy is the central fact of American life.”

“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

“Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

On Politics:

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so.”

“Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice like, Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.”

“Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.”

“Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.”

“Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be.”

“As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.”

General:

“The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country— and we haven’t seen them since.”

“Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an I.Q. of 60″

“A good deed never goes unpunished.”

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

“The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.”

“The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.”

“There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

“A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”

This post was originally published on nymag.com. Click here to read it.

The economist Niall Ferguson had a piece in Newsweek the other day entitled “The Cure for Our Economy’s Stationary State.” As in his most recent book, the Harvard historian pointed out that the economies of the United States and Europe have lost their dynamism, while China is leaping ahead. The solution? More technological innovation, says Ferguson, along with “more free trade, more encouragement for small business, less bureaucracy, and less crony capitalism.” Especially less bureaucracy. “Question: if you want to open a lemonade stand in New York City, how long does it take to jump through the necessary bureaucratic hoops? The answer is 65 days (including a wait of up to five weeks for your Food Protection Certificate). That’s the kind of crazy red tape that development economists like Hernando de Soto used to blame for Third World poverty.”

Alas, I don’t know anything about Hernando de Soto, but I do recognize a lame journalistic convention when I smell one, and sure enough, the “65 days” Ferguson cites with triumphant specificity comes not from any academic institution or think tank or good government group, but from John Stossel, the moustachioed libertarian gadfly of Fox News.

Last February, Stossel got worked up because some excessively officious cops in Midway, Georgia, closed down a lemonade stand operated by two sisters, 10 and 14. Appalled by this lack of common sense, Stossel decided to see what it would take to open a lemonade stand in New York City, and he had a high old time making the city seem stupid for requiring him to have a fire extinguisher and to take a food-preparation course and get his tax payment arrangements properly set up. In the end, Stossel did not actually complete the exercise; had all the inspections been conducted as scheduled, he says that the exercise would have taken — ta daaa — 65 days.

Of course, it’s absurd to suggest that lemonade stands would need regulation, and the vast majority come and go without the heavy hand of Big Government crimping anyone’s entrepreneurial style. (Stossel himself set up a stand on Sixth Avenue in front of News Corp. headquarters before his approval process was completed, and the police ignored him.) What made the exercise seem so ridiculous, of course, is that the tendentious Stossel was obviously completing the program that a full-fledged restaurant would have to go through: food-preparation courses for chefs, regular Health Department inspections, and a fire extinguisher on the wall. And 65 days doesn’t seem like an excessive amount of time to complete the process.

Ferguson, meanwhile, cites the 65 days like it was written at the bottom of the tablet Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. A reporter’s gimmicky stunt now has the imprimatur of a Harvard historian. And Fox News still loves the lemonade gimmick, interviewing two little girls about their lemonade stand as part of the Barack Obama “you didn’t build that” faux-troversy.

In the meantime, let’s declare a moratorium on lemonade-stand regulation. The drag on the economy just isn’t worth it.

While we’re waiting for that to happen, let’s keep an eye open for that magic “65 days” figure to show up again. Bedbugs are easier to kill that a juicy factoid.