FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

• Back when George Will signed up with Fox News, I wondered why; though he and they were both technically conservative, Will seemed too pointy-headed for people who think Fred Barnes is a sage and Steve Doocy a wit. But Will's recent column in which he suggested ladies get raped for the street cred shows that he had a strategy. The column has raised an outrage and even gotten him unsyndicated by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (who knew, women read newspapers too!) but it has also made Will a hot ticket among the yahoos who think Will has been punished for "blasphemy" ("this is America -- not China, not Cuba... despite the left’s attempts to silence," argh blargh etc.) and use the term "feminazi" seriously. Years of bullshit and bad-faith arguments have sufficiently infantilized these guys that a weedy professor type like Will would just make them mad with his fancy lingo -- unless he used it to validate their more thuggish sentiments. So goodbye ruminative considerations of U.S. policy, hello war on women, only with a bow-tie, and the brethren may consider their cause uplifted by the endorsement of a genuine intellectual. (Camille Paglia must be kicking herself.)

• Visiting Clickhole does not make me as happy as not visiting it but knowing it exists. Is this the future of the web? Paging Prof. Jeff H. Jarvis...

• Terry Teachout has an interesting list of American artworks he would require high school students to study. The choices are intelligent and worth debating, but he prefaces the thing by telling how the UK's Tory education minister got rigorous about teaching literature and this resulted in a "predictable convulsion of high-minded outrage" in which the minister was accused of being "antiprogressive."  I'd love to know how your average conservative parental units in, say, Minot, North Dakota would react to the news that their young'uns would be forced to absorb Martha Graham and Langston Hughes. Oh, one other thing, Terry -- I recommend we add Otto Preminger's Skidoo to the film curriculum. It will teach the kids something about the 60s, and scare them off drugs.