I thought I would gain a little more insight into Traister's fascinating take on the Vanity Fair issue, but all I see here is shallow commentary.

Traister is right on target. It is not OK to stuff a magazine with disembodied boobs and butts, no matter how often every other magazine does it. And I say this not as some kind of uptight, point-missing cutting-edge pseudo-feminist. I say this just as me. Kudos for mentioning that not a single non-acting director or writer was featured in this "Hollywood" issue. And that this photo spread misses a certain tension between titillation and seriousness. It's just scandalous that the magazine turned away a major, up-and-coming actress for the cover shot because she wouldn't get naked.

It's more than OK to be sexy or provocative in the pages of a magazine. I like that kind of thing. But didn't this cross a line somewhere? People who wish to be provocative should be ready for others to comment just as provocatively on them.

Thanks to the letter writers who pointed out that Hollywood is sinking like its favorite ship, the Titanic. Ditto for glossy magazines if they insult our intelligence the same way Hollywood has. Just as Hollywood looks toward its next remake of something not worth making the first time, or the next special-effects rendition of monsters already seen in another movie, or the next bleach-blonde starlet who confesses to anorexia while posing in a bikini, the magazine industry has opted for soft-core porn, sex tips, and boredom for the past 10 years, signalling the beginning of its own end.

I posted a letter earlier and have been following the whole discussion since, and I must say:

WHO TOLD ANYONE THAT BY BEING RIGHT ABOUT SOMETHING THEY GET TO INSULT EVERYONE ELSE?

If you cannot say something provocative and radical without using the F-word, or without enjoying others' responses, don't bother. Arguing one's point of view doesn't mean calling for everyone else to be squelched -- so I guess I may be breaking my own rule here -- but honestly, are you really proud of all this low-class haranguing of each other? Or is that why we use anonymous tags, so we can indulge in hit-and-run character assassinations?

It's all just as boring as . . . Vanity Fair nudie spreads. And about as intelligent.

By the way, I really like mle's comments. Neither I, Traister, nor anyone agreeing with her has argued that Vanity Fair and the like should be outlawed. We simply exercised our right to talk back to it. Ain't that America?

Just as nobody forced these starlets at gunpoint to disrobe, it is equally true that nobody forced Tom Ford to make a public ass of himself. The public signed no agreement with him to refrain from criticizing his work. He put it out there, and we shot it down. Nothing unfair -- or uncivil -- about that. It happens every day in the art world.

I agree with the letter writer who exposed the haughty assumption that Americans don't care about Abu Ghraib anymore. Because it really isn't a journalist's job to report their own interpretations and call them public opinion. I mean, nobody really knows what Americans think, do they? When was the last time anybody asked, in a non-biased way?

But I also have to object that, by one important measure, America seems to have let it all pass: If we cared, we would have stopped this by now. Abuses continue in prisons, even domestic ones. Bills limiting interrogation techniques seem always to get lost somewhere in Congress. Who hired these people -- Congressmen -- anyway? We did. So stop pretending that America cares but is being hoodwinked by politicians. The responsibility to stop this is ours.

My first encounter with torture was not with Abu Ghraib, but with foreign students in the '80s. I was nearly forced by conscience into an ill-conceived marriage to keep my boyfriend from being deported to the U.S.-allied country where his friends were being tortured and killed. I had to see my country for what it was, good and bad; I had to grow up and claim citizenship and responsibility in a superpower. When did so many other people get a free pass on growing up?

I hope that journalists, both courageous and cowardly, will keep publishing photographs like these, right in our faces. The point is, they're being published, so nobody can say they didn't see them.

Does anybody for a second really believe that this corrupt party of election-stealers, who literally own the Florida voting machines, are going to have any trouble locking seniors out of the election in November?

We like to pretend, don't we, that we are still living in a country in which what everyone thinks, or even what Republican folks think, is important. Did you happen to notice at some point that pharmaceutical companies sponsor the evening news? That's why reporters for these stations periodically stick microphones in the faces of voters in Halfwit County so that middle-class rednecks can repeat what was just told to them by the evening news between the Nyquil ads -- and call this representative of the country. Not that it matters anyway, because it is now just a matter of computer programming to bias all the voting machines in Florida and Ohio and a growing number of states.

We need to stop talking about PowerPoint presentations and Democratic organizing machines and start talking reality -- that this country has been taken over by an organized crime ring. Did it ever occur to anyone that the reason Democrats don't capitalize on all the Republican disasters of the past couple of years is that they don't want to? The discussion should focus on how the population can overthrow a bipartisan organized crime ring, nonviolently.