It's excellent source material for creativity ... that is, if you survive it! Look at all the great artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians who suffered under repressive totalitarian governments. If they had lived in boring countries where their civil rights were protected, they never would have been hauled off to the camps in the middle of the night or tortured or had all their relatives killed ... and would have never had all of those personal experiences to draw upon for their art. They'd be writing stale courtroom dramas instead of harrowing memoirs of survival. They'd be drawing trite greeting card illustrations instead of portraits of the damned souls they met in prison. They'd be crafting cheesy pop ditties instead of grand symphonies celebrating the resilience of the human spirit against repression. And our literature, museums and concert halls would be the worse for it.

Of course the government will do its best to destroy you if it can't co-opt your artistic vision, but that's the breaks. Being persecuted is great for your career. The publicity you'll get from being denounced is enormous. Everyone will want to hear your songs, read your poems or see your movies after they're banned, if only to find out what all the fuss is about. You'll need to get your works smuggled out of the country, of course, or have a sympathetic neighbor rescue your creation from the floor after the soldiers have dragged you and your family off to god knows where. Fleeing the country one step ahead of the tanks works, too. Dying young is one of the best things you can do for your career, and you'll be even more famous if you die in a prison camp or an uprising instead of killing yourself with booze, guns or drugs like everyone else does.

The state of the arts in the United States is lousy and a bit of totalitarianism would do much to enliven it. A repressive government would eliminate a whole bunch of creatives for starters, so there would be more demand for the output of the survivors. The world would thirst for our tales of dramatic escapes across the Great Lakes or of surviving the Halliburton prison camps in Texas. (Don't worry, we'll be imprisoned with congenial, like-minded people -- gays, lesbians, environmentalists, Quakers, pacifists, Muslims, the entire population of San Francisco, journalists and other enemies of the state -- so we'll have plenty of interesting conversations in the barracks at night.) We'll be mining our experiences for years after the constitution is finally restored, the emaciated camp survivors are freed, and the ink dries on the exiles' book deals. There's absolutely no downside for anyone who manages to avoid the unmarked mass graves that are planned for us in remote parts of South Dakota.

Title IX was meant to insure equal access to educational and athletic opportunities for girls. People tend to forget about the educational access part, but it's the more important one. What I fear will happen if we segregate kids by gender is that the girls' schools will be shortchanged on resources. Because society values men more than women, people will think it's more important to pour money into the boys' schools. It's happened in the past and can happen again given the reactionary ideologies in play today.

And I think this kind of discrimination will happen even with voluntary single-sex charter or magnet schools. It will be justified by the same overgeneralizations that are now being cited to create these gender-segregated schools. The backlash against girls for being too academically successful will also factor in. When buildings are being assigned to the new magnet schools, the girls school will be stuck with an old building because the poor struggling boys need a newer one with better facilities. The funding won't be there for new sports facilities at the girls school because everyone knows boys are more athletic. The boys school will get the computer upgrades first because they'll be thought to need them more -- everyone knows girls are naturally worse at programming so giving them good equipment is a waste.

Don't make the mistake of thinking these attitudes have disappeared. I have heard them expressed in one form or another for years! The likely result of gender segregation is that girls will lose slowly and by fiat the equal access that Title IX guarantees.

And I can't wait for his next "Lucky Ducky" strip.

Nobody tells musicians who express conservative or patriotic opinions that they are unqualified to express these ideas BECAUSE THEY ARE MUSICIANS. Yet the minute a musician expresses liberal, populist or anti-war opinions, the conservative peanut gallery immediately claims that what they say doesn't count because they're ONLY an entertainer -- and therefore should have never spoken up in the first place! Shut up and sing, ladies, shut up and sing. The Dixie Chicks aren't the only people this has happened to (Michael J Fox is now getting similar treatment from Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans), but they are the ones with the highest profile.

And it's always the same tactic. Never respond directly to the message. Instead, discredit the messenger.

Why are the Dixie Chicks less qualified to speak their minds about the President than their flag-waving country music compatriots? All of them are musicians, but somehow it's only the liberal musicians that are dismissed as irrelevant lightweights. Why is an actor less qualified to express his opinion on stem cell research than a talk radio host? Both are entertainers, but somehow the opinion of a man who has lived with Parkinson's disease for years is dismissed as being unimportant.

Could it be that conservatives are scared that people are listening?