Georgia has been a hornet's nest of activity since the election of Obama. The GOP is SCARED STIFF! Martin did much too well in what everyone had assumed was still the heart of the Confederate south, actually outpolling Obama in the stone age parts of the state away from Atlanta. The GOP poured money into Georgia, with Saxby commercials playing every commercial break on all the Northwest Georgia cable systems. Martin had no chance at all in the runoff, simply because there was little to no chance that the Dems could pull in the numbers of new voters that they did in the general election. This was a lost cause from the beginning.

My own relatives, good Christian folks who happen to believe that the Duke Boys were crusaders against government corruption and that their tv show was a documentary series, voted early and often. All the Baptist congregations had Chambliss signs proudly displayed on their lawns. Even a few folks with working cerebellums switched votes under the "denying the Dems a supermajority" bullshit train.

Georgia will go Democratic eventually. It'll happen when the Hispanic population, still HEAVILY undocumented right now, begins to vote. But the one thing you can count on is that the racism, bigotry and hatred will get worse once that happens, not better. Until national standards are set for education, until every child is taught the same set of basic facts, until we actually do something towards achieving Jefferson's educated electorate, the Klan, the Birchers, the Baptists will be with us, clamoring for "Gabble Gabble, one of us", like Palin or Huckabee, to take power. We dodged a bullet with W, his backers sat on the worst aspects of his fundamentalism. If the Religious Right actually elects one of their own, that balance won't be there. Let's hope Obama responds to what is possibly our greatest challenge, an overhaul of the education system that will actually lead to change in these third world pockets of the rural south. W's cuts in funding have all but made it impossible for those who want to to attend college. That has to be addressed, or we may still end up as radioactive slag, "good Christian" slag, but slag nonetheless.

the recent descent on Italy into fascism will be surprised by this. The Prime Minister's hero is Mussolini. The Black Shirt's spiritual descendants roam the land practicing the eternal rites of genocide, this time against a primarily Gypsy population, since after all Hitler sort of solved the Italian problem with the Jews at least for several more generations.

Innocent Americans expecting Italy to be a land of romance always need to keep in mind that the Mafia arose on Italian soil, and still flourishes there. Of course the strong man is everything. Italy has always been a land of corruption and brutality, and most of the Italian popupation who might have an interest in feminism have long since fled for friendlier shores. The PM makes Murdoch look fair and balanced, and graft and intimidation have always been his business methods of choice in his accumulation of power and wealth and his takeover of Italian media. It's just business as usual in the land of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. This is a people who have elected a tyrant. Let them live with the consequences, but always be ready to practice containment.

I read the Narnia books as part of a general childhood plundering of sci-fi and fantsy lit in all its forms. I see only what I detest about Narnia, a pernicious and flagrant fundamentalist agenda wrapped in a candy coating. To me, Lewis is very similar to Heinlein, despite coming from the previous generation. I loved Heinlein's storytelling as a child. As I grew into a more sophisticated and discerning reader, I learned to recognize the propaganda generation both men indulged in so freely, Lewis's shilling for his particular repellent biblical literalism contrasting to but in the end resembling Heinlein's fascism and Ayn Rand individualism. Both are repellent to me now, and I would no sooner give my children "The Last Battle" or "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" than I would "Mein Kampf". In the end, the negation of most of modern liberalism is just too hard to look over. There are alternatives to both men that won't indoctrinate your kids into cult type thought.

Writers always deserve to be engaged in from something as close to their own milieu as we can reach. It's wrong to fault them for sexism, racism, class distinctions that were standard in their time. But to serve as a polemicist for these values, as Lewis was all too prone to do, is just another story. Remember not just Narnia, but also " The Screwtape Letters", "The Great Divorce", the biblical allegory of Lewis' Sci-fi series. To me, it's just not worth the dangers.

Give the children in your life books that, if not agenda free, at least try to teach those things that we value so much, freedom, equality, reasoning. Books like Pullman's Dark Materials, Leguin's Earthsea series, the juvenile novels of Anne McCaffrey, Ende's "Neverending Story", Franke's "Inkheart", Gaiman's "Coraline", anything by Diana Wynne Jones, there really is just no end to the alternatives. Let Narnia sink into the abyss of forgotten propaganda, along with the Left Behind type abominations. I suspect that the message in the Narnia books is more invasive and pernicious that the present writer is allowing herself to admit, and the message is so retrogressive that it's best just not to take the chance.