Americans think they're going to be rich.

We know we aren't going to be able to earn wealth, so we have to win it or have it bestowed upon us. Without any sense of irony about defamation of American character, we gamble in Indian casinos, buy lottery tickets and try and get on tv so we can make become "stars" on a reality show.

Obama's cry of change and hope is easy to take, easy to believe because it doesn't involve us doing anything differently. It doesn't address the realities of institutionalized inequality or of competing interests. It places the burden of change on one person, makes one person the figure head and the enforcer. It fits our mythology of a single strong man, a hero, a savior.

True enough we are busy raising funds for a new playground and volunteering at the school library. We are fed up, but we are also tired. Hope gives us energy and, if it's the illusion of change, we don't have to expend more energy to change our habits or shift our perspective. We want a diet pill, not to eat less of healthier food.

Despite the fact that Reagan's policies removed the underpinnings of social safety -the schools, the hospitals, the regulations that prevented market value from overwhelming social value - people ran with the idea that we were privileged because we are Americans. We ran with the idea that military strength translated into economic equality. We didn't want to see ourselves as failing to hold our ideals dear enough to do something to achieve them.

Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by implying that by mentioning tough times, by talking about poverty and false hope, Carter caused the malaise he was trying to address. Reagan's slogan, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" implied that upward mobility stagnated because of character flaws in our leadership, not because of economic systems.

We preferred to believe we could be like Reagan: rich, self assured and in power. The poor were poor because they didn't defy gravity and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. It's why we prefer to gamble, to think we can beat the casinos with all their security and tricks and with decks literally stacked against wining.

Penalizing prostitutes but not the johns is a travesty of criminal justice. Why is it a lesser crime to be the market for selling bodies than the bodies that serve it? Somehow, in the eyes of the law, the victims are the men who pay for a fantasy.

While I don't see how punishing prostitutes changes the dynamic, putting sex and work into a job description is an emotional and psychological oxymoron. The women in this article refer to the emotional consequences of being targeted as criminals, but they don't address the emotional consequences of selling one's body, of selling one's body while knowing it's a criminal act. The sex workers I've known feel a devastating combination of internal, personal and external, political pressure, of anger and sadness.

Our bodies house the spirit and the mind, the fiction that something that happens to one doesn't affect the others is just as damaging as the fiction that prostitutes are happy hookers or that sex work is simply a job without clothes and value judgments. This goes for the men as well as the women. If a guy believes that the girl he's paid for is really a going to medical school, or doing this part time for money to send her kid to private school, he's lying to himself and contributing to the delusion. I'd bet he's lying to his wife as well.

We Americans lie to ourselves about sex. We espouse abstinence because sex is dirty and distracts us from God. We use sex to sell beer and trucks and music. We glamourize motherhood and babies, but not the sex that procreation requires. We divorce sex from life and create this fantasy world of lust without consequence.

No one wants to think of their mother or daughter as selling herself for money. The sorrowful presence of Deborah Jeane Palfrey's mother as witness to her daughter's life and death reminds us that sex isn't just physical. It is an integral part of our being that should neither be criminalized nor reduced to meaninglessness.

The process by which "Dr." Amen became a reliable source follows the same pattern that legitimized the war in Iraq and fabricated a controversy between evolution and creationism. Instead of examining the evidence or looking at the work, one media outlet looks to other media outlets for support.

If a person was in the NY Times, his work must be substantive; if he was on PBS he must be credible. Rather than having editors and omnibudsmen who evaluate stories, we have people who choose according to marketability. Marketability relies on manipulation, on creating conflict.

PBS has, like newspapers, lost sight of the product it sells - trustworthy coverage of news and cultural events.