Johann Sebastian Bach sent two of his three sons to study law at the University of Leipzig. There was never any doubt that they would go into the family business, and indeed all three became important composers. But surely their legal training helped them hold their own in contractual disputes, aided in conflict resolution, helped them comprehend the power structures they found themselves part of, etc.

A wise friend is fond of saying, "Know the Food Chain and Avoid Your Predators." Hunter S. Thompson was known for defining politics as "the art of controlling your environment." Artists will never be masters of the world, but they can take care of themselves better if they engage actively and shrewdly with the mundanity that tolerates their existence. To protect the zone of safety and comfort we all need to create, knowledge of what lurks beyond its borders is preferable to a short-sighted indifference. (Besides, there's a kind of art in negotiating the non-artistic world!) Of course, that restricts the opportunities for artistic martyrdom and betrayal, so I respectfully withdraw my observations until next week.

The last great national hangover of the type Gary describes happened when Richard Nixon left office. Like W, Milhous was worthy of full-time contempt. Unlike W, he got something of what he deserved--that asterisk in the record book by his name indicating that he was the first president in history to resign, and the report of the House Judiciary Committee recommending impeachment, won't ever go away. (Of course, Nixon in retirement regained a modicum of street cred because people have short memories.) Also unlike W, he left behind some constructive, if poorly implemented, extensions of the Great Society--the EPA, for instance.

But the main problem once Nixon left the national stage was that, like boxing after Ali, or basketball after Michael Jordan, there just didn't seem to be anyone worth the average political junky's attention left on the political scene once Tricky D left for San Clemente. (Ronald Reagan was able to sneak into the national consciousness because we were sleeping off our hangover from two decades of Great Men.) I don't see this as a problem for us today. And the problems that the reign of Bush/Cheney has left us with will be altogether too much with us in the decades ahead. Mainly, how will we cope with our decreasing economic, political and military clout vis a vis the rest of the world? For what Bush symbolizes is the beginning of the end of global American power. When your entire country is rotting away from the inside, it's hard to play Global Cop convincingly, and we may eventually have to admit this to ourselves. This would have happened anyway, but he and his handlers did their damnedest to hurry it along.

Has Ms. Paglia been invited to grace the pages of Salon solely as some kind of self-parodying send-up of narcissistic celebrity intellectuals? On Internet chat groups, her schtick would be called "trolling for flames." Her m.o. is:

(1) Begins anecdote about what she was doing recently, e.g. watching Fox News, attending a media event, etc. (The anecdote that follows is genuine, trenchantly iconoclastic, and important, because SHE witnessed it; it happened to HER. Get it?)

(2) Says something that is sure to rattle the liberals' cages. This requires no understanding, simply market research: The consensus among Salon readers is that the very existence of Ann Coulter as anything other than a one-day media footnote says disturbing things about public discourse in our nation. So praise Coulter's thoughtfulness and intellectually depth. The "liberal bias" of the main stream media is a canard long ago debunked at length. So tell liberals to lighten up; they "have" the major TV networks, the Times, the Post, etc., but all the Right has is Fox. (At what point does this gag of hers descend into outright sadomasochism?) Then

(3) Move on to the next anecdote. If the liberals protest, accuse them of close-mindedness, hypocrisy, etc. To keep it real and ghetto, drop as many hip gender-deconstructin' terms as possible into the mix.

It would be fallacious to respond to any of her baited hooks as though they represented anything but a reflexive attempt to incite outraged howls (and thus keep our focus where it belongs, on her; have you bought my poetry anthology yet?). She shares this one salient attribute, at least, with Coulter.

Am I missing something, or are the grammatical mistakes, typos and factual errors in Barra's review intentional?

--Albert and Alfred Einstein were NOT brothers.

--"Montesque" is, I assume, the French writer Montesqieu.

--Here Barra is quoting James: "There is no reasons except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop." Is this Barra's mistake, or James's?

Good criticism, and good metacriticism, would seem to me to thrive on careful reading and writing. I can't really evaluate Barra's take on James, let alone James's ideas themselves, with this kind of carelessness undercutting his aticle.