Alec Mouhibian

At long last, and in time for its third issue of the post-HoMo era, The Bruin Standard is back online at www.thebruinstandard.com. Ever since September, the paper’s been in the hands of editor in chief Mark Stefanos–witty, weedy, and Egyptian–with arm support from layout and copyeditor Corey Garriott, who shall be remembered by posterity as the man who once randomly said: “You know, Alex, I really hate it when people spell my last name with only one T.”

The new issue also includes my priceless observations on Obama and Change.

Stay tuned, anxious TBS alumni, for when the archives are added to the site, so you can show your spouse’s grandchildren how “Prettier Mommy” used to prove she was smart in the halcyon days of 2006.

Mohammed Ali had a moment of ethnic honesty in 1976. Having just returned to the United States from Zaire, where he knocked out George Foreman in the now-canonized “Rumble in the Jungle,” Ali was asked for his impressions on Africa. After all, Ali’s forebears had lived in Africa until they were dragged out of their homes and homeland, and stuffed into slave ships headed for American plantations.

And yet the boxing champion of the world offered neither lament nor fury. His ancestral homeland hadn’t inspired him at all. “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat,” Ali said.

On the 93rd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, should Armenians thank God?

I answer this question, and others, in an op-ed for the L.A. Times.

Googling yourself is a nasty habit. Done once in a while it seems healthy enough. But even then it’s only a matter of time before you’re just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling away, being reminded of past embarrassments, feeling guilty that you’re not Googling someone else, yet unable to stop until everything within has been splattered onto the screen of the present and you’re completely drained. It’s a disease. And if you’ve ever clicked on repeat the search with the omitted results included, it’s clinical.

Then again, there’s always the chance you’ll discover something about yourself that makes the whole sordid business worth its while. Recently that happened to me. Deep into a mad bout of Googlebation, I came upon the page of this MySpace group:

The Don’t Be A Dumb Femnazi That Takes Everything Too Seriously (D.B.A.D.F.T.T.E.T.S.) Foundation would like to thank Margaret Sanger, Dr Alfred Kinsey, Christina Sommers, Camille Paglia, Alec Mouhibian, and everyone else that takes issues like gender and sexuality with an honest and open approach. Also, special thanks to George Carlin for making such great progress in the field of people being frank with one another.

Slap me silly and call me Camille! I haven’t been this flattered since somebody with poor vision once said I looked like Lawrence Olivier in Wuthering Heights. (How poor was his vision? I usually get Corey Matthews, the star of Boy Meets World who was always inexplicably horny for that hippie-infested neighborhood in Los Angeles.)

Paglia and me, cheek to cheek, with George Carlin bringing up the side? Not quite the sexiest situation I’ve ever imagined, but a close second. I’ll take it.

My inclusion in this company must’ve been inspired by the time I gleefully watered the dry, dry daisies of UCSB’s Women’s Center when I was a columnist at the Daily Nexus in 2005. “I’ll readily admit that the word rape kind of turns me on,” I confessed, “but that’s only because it rhymes with ape.”

The paper got a historical deluge of responses to the offending piece, and I got stalked on AIM. What a gas. I’m still grateful to all the gender feminists who wished me death upon the occasion. Their restraint was appreciated, in contrast to those who wished me enrollment in a women’s studies course.

All in all, the episode stands as a modest achievement in public service. The Women’s Center took two weeks off from proselytizing phallophobia to try and get me fired. I like to think that, because of me, a few vulnerable coyotes made it unscathed. I like to think that, because of my work, a few frat boys lost an arm.

Where have all the good times gone? My opinion editor at the Nexus had spent the first month of school in rehab for crack, after she got the job by sleeping with the editor-in-chief, who called me to his office amid the bloodbath to say: “Do you realize I won’t ever get laid here again? That’s a joke.” The last part was added a little too grimly, a little too quickly, obscuring exactly which half of the statement was gallows humor.

Ah, the Nexus. Best college paper in the country, and that’s not a joke. The spirit of the 1940s newsroom still looms there, drunk and proud. Here’s hoping my EIC is getting laid right now in a hammock somewhere. Here’s hoping my opinion editor is still alive. Bless ‘em both, they deserve it.

I never got to enjoy my fifteen minutes of fame. That’s because I traded it for David Brock’s soul. It was either his or Andrew Sullivan’s—then new on the subterranean market—and I took the one that keeps on taking. Does my decision seem shallow? Rest assured my first choice would’ve been the treasured soul of Robert Johnson, but Eric Clapton had swiped it just the year before. In return for what, who knows? Maybe the devil got to sit in on his rhythm section that year.

As for the founder of D.B.A.D.F.T.T.E.T.S., Riley Freeman, I’m glad to report he’s intellectually consistent:

Although I do think women should cook and give blowjobs, I think that men should cook and eat pussy, and they both should have jobs & an education. I’m all about equality, and I’m 110% for women’s rights and empowerment. But if you can’t take a joke or laugh about something, then you need to die.

This almost seems too good to be true. The group was founded in late 2006 and its founder is from Oklahoma. How was he aware of something that happened in Santa Barbara early 2005? Could this be one of many individually-tailored mirages constructed by Google to disarm those of us who fear its gathering omnipotence?

I haven’t been blogging because thoughts, lately, haven’t appeared to me in their usual small, manageable doses. They spill over their own shadows now, and into new ones. The other day I was jogging in Riverside Park, jogging six or seven paces behind a man on roller blades. It was his first time, obviously, and he almost slipped and fell into the river a few times. I decided that, if he should fall into the river, I’d sprint and dive right after him. I had some instinctive sympathy for this strange man, in part because I guessed from his clothes and roller blades that he was new to this country. Being sentimental in these things, I prepared myself to jump. But then my way home opened up to the right. I almost wanted to keep following the man, knowing full well that once I lost sight of him, I’d also lose my responsibility for him. I didn’t follow him, and I went my own way, but I’ve been thinking about him to this day, wondering if he fell into the river.

This story is way old, but I just realized there is no online record of the article I’d written last year on the Beauchamp scandal, in which I tried to capture the “big picture.” Here it is…

Read more…

Washington confessionals tend to revolve around a familiar victim, cruelly neglected if not outright oppressed by the author, who knew the right way all along: himself. Why, if only the temptations of modesty were resisted long enough to heed that precious sage, milk and honey might be marinating our very bunions as we speak.

Robert Novak has refreshingly spurned this formula in The Prince of Darkness, his own substantial Washington memoir, and the result will be like crack to political junkies. My mini-review of the book is up at the Washingtonian now.

Here is a tantalizing excerpt:

The only surprising thing so far is that, unlike most insider accounts, Novak’s is never an example of what it disdains; his half century’s experience in our fair capital meshes perfectly with his own gradually developed belief in small government. But for anyone eager to rest on clichés of how power corrupts absolutely, a further surprise is in store.