I can readily understand Laura Miller's ambivelance about Rapaille's observations. Many years ago I remember reading a film review by John Simon which was titled "irony for beginners;" I don't remember the name of the picture Simon reviewed, but the concept stayed with me.

I couldn't help but think of that a few years later when I watched American Beauty, and I was struck by its strange combination of haute visual style and thematic vacuity-- we were being told a sophisticated story about...dare we say it? The (supposedly) incredibly forthright and gutsy observations that: American suburban life is not all that it seems on the surface, many people are unhappy even though they're surrounded by all sorts of pricey consumer goods they struggled to accumulate, people have a hard time relating to each other because of how stifled they feel by the roles imposed on them, etc, etc. Who knew?

Maybe the book itself fleshes things out more. Nevertheless, Rapaille seems to be offering forth observations about this and that and consumerism in much the same vein, and frankly, many of his observations seem like they've been borrowed from elsewhere. Baudrillard (and tons of other social scientists) have talked about the Disney effect, but I have a feeling that Rapaille hasn't spent much time in the bible belt-- otherwise he might take American religious fundamentalists more seriously, and not dismiss them so cavalierly.

Likewise, if you go back to a couple of American writers from many years ago who are now out of fashion, you can find some of the same themes addressed: In fiction by Sinclair Lewis( Main Street, Babbit) and in nonfiction in by Vance Packard( The Hidden Persuaders, The Status-Seekers,etc.)

Just in passing: 1. I think that the fact that the US has never been successfully invaded has a great deal to do with the so-called adolescence of Americans, as compared to Europeans, who can't help but know their history better because it happened to them at home, and there still isn't a European alive who hasn't at least grown up with family members or others who lived through WW2.

2.If Rapaille came down here to the south-- I suspect he hasn't, apart perhaps from switching flights or giving a talk at at a university-- he might well wonder if people here have gotten over losing the civil war.

Ok. Everybody knows that Libra is 12 per cent better than Underworld, and Beloved was, just barely, 3 and a half per cent better than Humboldt's Gift. But after that stupid Oprah movie came out, Humboldt surged ahead and won on points. I know Bellow was going for a knockout, but the judges were disappointed in More Die of Heartbreak and I think that's why it was so close. That, and because he was dead. Wait a minute-- my producer is telling me that other people who aren't famous are actually still writing stuff, so we may have to do this again next year.

or at the very least, she's the one who knows how to look at things, and everyone else who looks at things differently doesn't.

Karen Armstrong sounds a little haughty and full of self-importance to me. She seems to be saying that all the world's religions are saying basically the same things, but if you said this to her, I suspect she'd dismissively say, "no,no,no, you don't understand at all. The axial age, ..." blah blah blah.

Likewise, the Bible and the Q'uran both discuss violence towards unbelievers, and apparently because she says these things shouldn't be interpreted so literlally, they're not that big a deal.

Religious fundamentalists only come to exist because of oppression by secularists? Please. Most of the battles between Catholics and Protestants or Hindus and Muslims, present and past are about turf, most emphatically not about some mean, secularist other who rules over them.

Finally, based on the interview, one comes away with the impression that she has nothing to say about Luther. Maybe this a reflection of an interviewer's lapse, or maybe she dismisses him because he is not a figure from the so-called axial age, and he wasn't a mystic. But how were ordinary people throughout Europe supposed to stand up to the hegemony of the Catholic Church without Luther?

Were peasants supposed to say, "oh, you silly old pope, I don't have to listen to you, all that Bible stuff is just poeticism that I can interpret as I see fit!"

I'm sorry Ms. Armstrong, but non-mystical theologians have made important contributions to the interpretations of faith too.

hello Patrick, and happy 39th,

you say that most aircraft incidents are survivable. Let me ask this-- I know that the safety folks study major accidents to find out the cause; do they study the occasional major accidents in which there were a substantial number of survivors, to seek if any of the variables causing the lesser mortality rates are reproducible?