I appreciate the point of view in this article. I'm attracted to existential perspectives myself. However, I'm glad I live in a world where we can recognize some essential meaninglessness in even our noblest endeavors, and also strive for ideals, however chimerical, however fractious and fragmented, however often we learn in retrospect that we were on the wrong track. Meaninglessness is ... well, meaningless if taken absolutely. Where we go wrong is not in having or striving for ideals, but in deluding ourselves that any of them are ultimate, unchangeable or, in a word, transcendent.

That's why I only love The Sopranos in a world where there's The Wire, too.

I lament the culture of the soundbite, where we make snap judgements about tiny snippets of what someone has to say. It's a way of silencing people; of making them more interpretable, more subject to our own perspectives and less likely to change us or touch us in any way. It makes discussions about race, which is a complex topic that rarely fits into a news clip, nearly impossible. Which is, I think, part of the reason for the soundbite culture to begin with.

We need to be able to distinguish between people making important points about racial injustices (as seems very much to be the case here), and people who are talking about race in a way that is an attack. Sometimes that takes time, rumination, and discussion. One of the ways we avoid having to talk about things like the exploitation of Latin American baseball players is by censuring people who speak out about it. And the best strategy possible is the role-reversal: if someone is pointing out racism, accuse him of being racist. To use a biblical metaphor, the devil sends his minions to us in the form of false prophets. In our culture this strategy often effectively shuts people up right quick. I am very happy that in this case that it did not.

As others have pointed out, we don't like the Tony Awards because most of us who don't live in or near New York have never seen any of the plays anyway and probably will never get within multiple state borders of them. The only exceptions are the ones that happen to be mega-successful enough to go on tour (and show up in our neck of the woods five or so years after they appeared on an awards show) or downscale enough for our local theater troupes to be able to actually stage and generally botch them.

What's less fun than an awards show about shows you've never seen, attended by people you'll never know, in a place you don't ever intend to visit?

Plenty of lackluster films with similar pretensions to profundity as the plays mentioned in this article get made and rewarded at awards show after awards show. But we still watch because those awards are about culture we can access as it is happening, instead of years and years after the fact, and share with friends and family for less than a week's worth of wages.

And let me second (or third by now?) the call for more theater broadcasts on television. It was PBS broadcasts of live performances like Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods that made me excited about the theater when I was young. Now if I hear about a new fantastic play or musical, I just sigh and hope someone makes a halfway decent film out of it so I can maybe see an adulterated version someday in the far future.

It's Anthony Soprano I'll be watching on Sunday. No question. I'd almost forgotten any other type of Tony even existed.

But let's not direct it only at the Bush Administration. They are perhaps the apotheosis of this evil, but not its progenitors.

As the article points out, our country has been doing evil shit like this to people for a long time.

Do minimal research on your subject.

Cite one and only one statistic.

Riddle your article with unspoken and undefended assumptions, such as that big butt fetishes are the reason for the weight statistics in African-American communities.

Pick a straw woman to serve as the focal point for your indignation.

Offer no real solutions except for advising your community to "grow up."

that we think inducing psychosis is a good way to get accurate information. If the intel all seems to make sense in the end, that's because the people making sense of it are just as deranged as the people who they have tortured to the point of psychological collapse.

Alright, so, like most of us, I winced at the anti-female-masturbation comments and the notion of women needing to be sexual "blank slates" before marriage. I found the opposition to homosexuality to be irritating, and the claims of a cure rather naive (and notice how she assumes all homosexuals are male). I don't agree with her on these issues, not in the slightest. Let's, by all means, recognize the insidiousness of the ideology that supports such positions.

But let's not waste too much gas treading and retreading our cultural conflicts. Too often we fall into the "Muslims are so awful to women and homosexuals" mode as a convenient way of ignoring how awful the rest of us can be to women and homosexuals.

And let's not be blinded by our disagreements so much that we ignore the radical nature of what this woman is doing, advocating for women's sexual pleasure (even if she has to couch her advocacy in the excuse that it contributes to marital fidelity). A lot of men in our own country could do with some of her advice on that issue. A lot of women too.

So there!

/silly