I was hoping someone would bring up STAR TREK.

I remember being afraid of Mutual Assured Destruction, WWIII, duck-and-cover drills, and reading things like Philip Wylie's TRIUMPH, A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, ALAS BABYLON...you know the books.

And then, thanks to a WWII bomber pilot and ex-cop, a Normandy veteran, and a couple of off-the-wall professionally trained actors including someone who was short-listed for SHANE, we had STAR TREK, which showed us not just surviving the Eugenics Wars and WWIII (about the time of Zephraim Cochrane), but evolving toward a final frontier that was headed "thataway" -- second star to the right and straight on toward morning.

STAR TREK got a lot of us dreaming and still dreaming.

You knew I was going to say it, didn't you?

(Trekkie, moi? Dear God yes. I watched first year TOS with my father and grew up to be the author of five Pocket Books STAR TREK novels. To this day, I love the stuff...even season IV of ENTERPRISE.)

Live long and prosper, you all. Or, as -I- personally prefer, "Jolan tru."

I have the same problem with de Beauvoir that a number of people claim to have about Hillary Clinton: her relationship with her partner.

There is such a disconnect between what she writes about and how she lived her life that I'm not particularly able to deal.

It's much like the Wertmuller film, "Swept Away." I never saw it because I understand that it involved rape. "But it's a symbol for ideology?" I was told at great length.

Nevertheless, I didn't see it.

Of course, I am talking about texts with which I am unfamiliar, but the reason I am unfamiliar with them is this disconnect. In a lesser being, one might call it hypocritical.

How do you reconcile this? This is a serious question, not a flame, BTW.

Their relationship was not one of equality, and it struck me as quite dodgy and marked by infidelity.

I'm no expert, but I think he leveraged off her hard work, as well.

I ran into this review http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/tindall_04_08.html

that makes me feel as if they had been anything but intellectually chic, people would be reacting more negatively -- like my example of Wertmuller and SWEPT AWAY.

I can't very well disavow the ideals because I share them, and I do not consider myself to be in bad faith.

I do call hypocrisy and bad faith on de Beauvoir and think she would have been judged much more harshly had she not A. been in association with Sartre, B. valorized with the label of "French intellectual."

Frankly, I consider neither a "get out of jail free" card.

If Muslim men have enough self-control to submit to the discipline that is Ramadan, they surely have enough control to not go up in smoke at the sight of a woman's face.

Unless, of course, they're the murderous characters in Saudi who refused to let schoolgirls who didn't have abayas flee a burning building. They -have- self-control for what they want to have self control -for-.

The whole thing reminds me -- rather provocatively, I admit -- of a story told of Golda Meir. After some assaults on women, some protective gentleman proposed a curfew on women, so they wouldn't be out at night.

Golda replied that the women hadn't done anything. "Curfew the men," she said.

This sermon insults men and endangers women.

Okay, it's on my to-be-read pile, which is about the size, the pitch, and probably the durability of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

A peripheral note regarding the woman who was horrified after returning from France at how haggard mothers are here (except, of course, the ones who take their little girls in for spa services, but that's another story...): consider the amounts of vacation time in France versus the U.S.

The U.S. work ethic gives us all sleep deficit, parent or not.

In my opinion, the people asking "why would a woman want to do X or Y or Z" that puts her in harm's way have got it bassackwards.

To me, it's very little different from "why would she walk THERE or wear THAT."

She wasn't a fool or she wouldn't have been hired. And presumably, she had her reasons. They're her business.

The question I want to ask is this: what sort of person deterioriates to the point where the person acts in such a way that rape seems almost wholesome (WTF am I SAYING?) compared with this deliberate attempt at annihilation?

And what sort of person covers it up?

Joseph Conrad was right about a heart of darkness.

Another male commentator got his itsy rocks off saying something vicious about a woman who happens to be Hillary Clinton and therefore, apparently, a legitimate target.

I am SO not-surprised.

What DOES surprise me, however, is how blatant it is.

At least, genteel and Gentile anti-Semitism used phrases like "ahem...not our kind, dear."

I suppose it's good to have our enemies in plain sight, their mouths flapping in the breeze.

I live and work in New York City. I'm media-trained, including a principal role in one nationally broadcast commercial, some practice in TV interviews, and extensive experience in public speaking. I'd be happy to talk to these people, as long as they don't ask me about finance (which I may not discuss): I'm pretty familiar with issues; and I can produce soundbites.

They don't call on me. Apparently, a meticulously groomed and jeweled suit-clad woman in her 50s, heading where she's going at top speed isn't what they're looking for.

Their loss.