Well, two of my favorite bloggers are having a dustup over fun, of all things. Instapundit and Ted Barlow are bickering over Alex Beam’s column in the Boston Globe, in which he discusses the idea that:

Is it true, to paraphrase the famous Clairol marketing campaign: Do conservatives really have more fun? The answer is yes, incontrovertibly so. Who would you rather be? Me, plodding through errands on my bicycle, sporting my pathetic ”One Less Car” T-shirt, or one of the many SUV drivers who blast exhaust in my face as they roar off to fill up on cheap gas?

Instapundit gets all ironic about it:

This is funny, but it’s a serious problem for the Left. Like Sweden, it’s cruised for a long time on a reputation for free-wheeling hedonism that no longer holds. The hair-shirt left is alienating to a lot of people — I mean, which would you rather have, wild sex and high living or Andrea Dworkin and a spare lifestyle relieved only by an affected moral superiority?

and then Ted gets genuinely upset:

Glenn has fairly complained about liberals who look at the Right as if it’s always and everywhere Birmingham in 1963. Then he turns around and talks about the left as if it’s always and everywhere Berkeley in 1985.

Geez, guys, lighten up.
First, and foremost, am I the only one who caught a whiff of self-depreciating irony in Beam’s column? The last half of the paragraph above drives the skewer right home:

Who would you rather be? Goo-goo good guy Warren Tolman, painstakingly explaining his position on the School Building Assistance Program? Or Mitt Romney, who has his own, no-frills education plan: Send them to (private, tony) Belmont Hill! It worked for his kids – why won’t it work for everybody?

and does it in what I’d consider to be a pretty damn fair (hence pro-liberal way). I read Beam’s column as a mild satire, playing on the stereotype of the humorless, crunchy liberal while actually hammering home a few pretty good pro-liberal points – good government and building schools is a liberal program, sending your kids to tony private schools isn’t. Beam then goes on to throw a few well-placed elbows at the stereotype…including Taki as an example of the ‘fun-loving’ right.
The danger of daily punditry is that quick reads miss obvious things, and we’re all reading too damn quickly. I think that Beam’s column was a bit of pointed fluff, that Glenn picked up on it to beat one of his favorite dead horses, and that Ted rose to the bait like a trout.
Look, here’s the deal. There are a bunch of people in the world…on the left and right…who are pissy and unhappy by nature. They tend to become bad bureaucrats and bad pastors. Somehow, about the time George McGovern got nominated, they captured the levers of liberal power over here (I don’t know European political history well enough to know when it happened over there, but it did), and the ‘don’t play with scissors’ crowd became the vanguard of leftist thought.
Me, I’m a leftist; how are — government-sponsored health care, support for unions, a higher minimum wage, stronger environmental laws, a biiig gas tax, support for same-sex marriage, progressive taxation, strong public schools, support for a woman’s right to choose – as credentials? I do think we need to temper those with the understanding that Stalinist command-and-control aren’t always the best way to get there, and that the new information technologies and the social and management structures enabled by those technologies ought to change the tactics we use to get from here to there. And most of all, I think that we need to design these in a way that encourages responsibility and individual accountability.
But enough serious stuff; I’ve led a life with just too damn much fun; my sexual history would make Dawn blush; vodka, hell – I’ve pretty much exhausted the possibilities in the pharmacopoeia; I’ve seen U2 at the Roxy, Nureyev at the SF Opera House, the Beatles at the Bowl; dated centerfolds from Playboy and Penthouse; been married to two great women; held my sons when they were born, and spent their first night with them sleeping on my chest; driven away from my oldest son as he moved into his own home (but still took him to the drugstore to buy him condoms); sailed in through the Golden Gate at dawn; seen 145 on the speedometer of a motorcycle; spent the night with a dying friend; and seen the dawn just sitting and talking with the amazing friends I have made; and maybejusy maybe am lucky enough to have finally found the right woman for the rest of my life.
I’m off today to take my 15 year old to the ‘Inland Invasion’ punk show. I’ll be the 49-year old guy with glasses in the mosh pit.
So here’s the deal folks. I do think that the visible Left needs to connect with its joy, and its aggressiveness. We need leftwing Vodkapundits, and leftwing Rush Limbaughs…well, maybe not…and leftwing Instapundits, too. And we need the same things on the Right, and in the Radical Center and from the Libertarians, and the Vegitarian Unitarian Veterinarians, for that matter. I said something once on this blog a while ago:

Forgive me if this sounds sappy, but there are voices out there folks, a great chorus of different voices, and when you listen to the song we’re all singing…well, to me, the song sounds sort of like America.