So, I'm reading Don DeLillo's 1985 novel "White Noise," and I get to the chapter about the cloud of deadly chemicals that DeLillo calls, mock-euphemistically, the "airborne toxic event."

Then I think, "Hmmm. That'd make for a pretty excellent band name."

And then, by uncanny coincidence, my Google Reader delivers me a post by L.A. Times "Buzz Bands" blogger Kevin Bronson about this band. Called Airborne Toxic Event.

Literary minds think alike?

Or am I just late to the scene?

- Scott Galupo

Speaking of being late to the scene, I feel obliged to stand up for the honor of another slice of '85 greatness -- "Fletch."

One of my favorite bloggers, Reihan Salam, is, I'm afraid, abominably wrong when he calls the movie "abominably bad." It's possible there's a bit of generational lag here, but I believe Reihan is less than a handful of years younger than I (I'm 30).

More likely is that Reihan is letting some reductionistic sociological analysis dull his funny bone.

As a far more timely Jonah Goldberg noted, Reihan may be onto something in sussing cultural snobbery in the Fletch character -- but that hardly means "Fletch" isn't funny.

Reihan declares "Fletch" a crypto-liberal backlash against the rise of Reaganism: "While the enlightened bourgeoisie and their scruffy spawn were no longer running the country, they could at least laugh along with Chevy Chase as he poked fun at Reagan's America -- the nouveau riche, the pig-headed cops, the Mormons."

Well:

* There's nothing wrong with poking fun at the nouveau-riche;

* Pig-headed cops do, in fact, exist in big cities like Los Angeles; and

* Fletch never pokes fun at Mormons in particular, inasmuch as he pokes fun at everyone and everything, including his own hygiene ("I don't shower much"). I never got the impression, either, that Alan Stanwyk, the movie's chief villain, was a practicing Mormon. Precisely the opposite.

Reihan flat misses the punchline, too, when, in serious high dudgeon, he says that Fletch "can't resist muttering some pointless crack about tacos when a Latina housemaid offers him a polite 'buenos dias.' Talk about a class act."

First, Fletch speaks mock Spanish several times throughout the movie (probably couldn't get away with that today, I imagine -- too ethnically insensitive). And in the scene Reihan refers to, Fletch doesn't just mutter a "pointless crack about tacos"; he mutters the name of a Southern California fast-food chain.

Sorry, Reihan. The smirk on my face is permanent. And if you're right that "The film perfectly captures the rise of the ironically detached hipster sensibility," then I'm forced to conclude, cheerfully, "Fletch" was even more influential than I thought.

- Scott Galupo

Arnold Schwarzenegger has apparently dived headfirst into a debate I wrote about last year: the ubiquity of Spanish-language TV and its impact on the country's Hispanic immigrant population.

Turns out, the Gubenator takes the Steve Sailer line that the Univision and Telemundo networks allow Hispanic immigrants to "cocoon themselves in a Spanish alternate universe."

Said Gov. Schwarzenegger: "You've got to turn off the Spanish television set. ... You're just forced to speak English, and that just makes you learn the language faster."

Hispanic leaders in California, predictably, had a cow.

Schwarzenegger's is a sensible position. I'm inclined to agree -- while acknowledging what one of my sources, American University's Robert Pastor, told me: that the major Spanish-language networks are most popular among first-generation immigrants; not so much their children. And because there's such a constant flow of new immigrants -- and thus viewers -- this phenomenon somewhat artificially amplifies the degree to which Hispanics here are "cocooned" in Sailer's Spanish alternate universe.

Whatever the case, Glenn Reynolds has a great line about the hostile reaction to Schwarzenegger: "Because what would Arnold know about people who come from a different land, raised in another language, who want to make a life for themselves in America?"

- Scott Galupo

The last time I saw ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons was at the Black Tie & Boots Inaugural Ball in 2001. As far as inaugural balls go, it's the coolest one in town -- especially when a Texan is being inaugurated.

As a measure of rock stardom, however, it's not exactly the hippest place to be.

Then, this: a performance of "Cheap Sunglasses" with the Raconteurs.

Officially cool again. If only for a few minutes.

Incidentally, here's my review of the new White Stripes album, which ran in Tuesday's paper. Loved it. FYI, my review copy did not include the song "Baby Brother." Hence I mistakenly refer to "Effect and Cause" as the album's final track. Sorry 'bout that.

Via Megan McArdle, I see Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, issued the following challenge:

I'd ask [ordinary Americans] how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.

I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

I'm guessing I did even worse than McArdle admits to doing. I agree with Gioia's point that mass American culture used to be a lot more intelligent; but the conditions of his challenge -- that those named be "living" and "American" -- are frankly rather absurd. Most (at any rate, many) Americans can still identify the figures of 50 years ago whom Gioia names.

The difference, it seems to me, is in the caliber of contemporary American fine art and poetry. (Scientific illiteracy is another matter.) Poetry, painting, and sculpture are, in some sense, exhausted art forms. That doesn't mean beauty or significance can't be achieved anymore in these media, but, rather like the language of religious liturgy, there ain't much new under the sun.

The action in our mass culture is where it intersects with technology; needless to say, it's a far different, and no less complex, world than that of 1957. I certainly don't celebrate the popularity of "American Idol" (I'm not all that bothered by it, either.) But neither am I sure that Americans would be better off spending their time with contemporary American poetry.

I throw my virtual hands in the air.

It seems the glossing over of Michael Moore's pathological mendacity is not limited to mainstream movie critics but to those who are actually fluent in public policy. Jonathan Cohn, a very smart guy and longtime advocate of progressive-style healthcare reform, writes in the New Republic that, before he saw "Sicko," he was fearful of Moore's slippery methods.

Then he saw it: "As 'Sicko' rolled, it did little to allay my fears. I spotted plenty of intellectual dishonesties and arguments without context -- enough, surely, to keep right-wing truth squads (and some left-wing ones) busy for weeks."

But, but, but: "[I]t was hard to get too worked up about all that. Because, beyond all the grandstanding and political theater, the movie actually made a compelling argument about what's wrong with U.S. health care and how to fix it. 'Sicko' got a lot of little things wrong. But it got most of the big things right."

Again, I give up. Is there any other filmmaker or politician or propagandist who is afforded such kid-glove criticism? I mean, Cohn in so many words admits Moore got "big things" wrong, too. As I wrote in an earlier post: "Under these extremely hospitable circumstances, how can Moore, in any sense, ever be 'wrong' about anything, so long as he is sentimentally on the 'right' side of whatever topic he's addressing?"

Cohn writes later that the vested interests that have resisted universal healthcare "have been spewing half-truths and outright falsehoods for decades," while proponents have been "too honest." In other words: Whatever its faults, "Sicko" helps even the score.

Pardon me, but it's not the job of people who write for the New Republic to credit people like Michael Moore for having well-intentioned passion. TNR is supposed to be more rigorous than that.

There is a case to be made for universal healthcare. "Sicko," which I've seen, does not persuasively make it. Here's a very sensible David Denby: "Moore winds up treating the audience the same way that, he says, powerful people treat the weak in America -- as dopes easily satisfied with fairy tales and bland reassurances. And since he doesn't interview any of the countless Americans who have been mulling over ways to reform our system, we're supposed to come away from 'Sicko' believing that sane thinking on these issues is unknown here."

Jonathan Cohn happens to be one of those people who've mulled over ways to reform the system. He should know better than to be one of Michael Moore's dupes.