>>the TV commercials portray women as carping ditzes

I think you meant to say that the commercials portray _a_ woman or a _group_ of women as carping ditzes.

And the problem with that is, again?

Just like American Beauty didn't say "all ex-Marines are repressed homosexuals" but rather "the one in this story is", and just like Brokeback Mountain isn't saying "all cowboys are gay" but rather "the two in the story are", no commercial can possibly be portraying what you claim these commercials are.

This is a problem of logic that is largely confined, thankfully, to North American critics. Movies, novels, plays, TV commercials, NEVER portray "men" or "women" or even "children under five who have rich parents" -- rather they portray individuals, with their individual wants and desires and flaws and charms, in the process of telling a "story".

See Salon's recent review of Jarhead for a saddening display of this logical error.

There are, however, plenty of non-fiction sweeping generalisations made by politicians, researchers, and journalists that demand challenge.

Like the ones in this specious little article.

It's been obvious to me for some time that Coulter is playing too one-dimensional a game to actually be a "conservative".

I mean, she drives away some members of her own party who are even fractionally left of "full right", but that's not her mission. Her mission is clearly to ensure that the "Reagan Democrats" never, ever, come back to the Republican Party.

Although I am impressed technically with the ploy of sending a pretend foaming, rabid attack dog over to the other side to drive the non-rabid back to your own team, and I think Coulter certainly does this, I can't help at be dismayed at her other effect: planting hideously offensive slogans in the mouths of the mouth-breathing element on the right. Kill them, convert their children to Christianity sort of stuff.

So unless she's already gone "off the reservation" -- in which case the rabid dog analogy needs to come to its analogical conclusion -- could Coulter's Democrat handlers please broadcast the "deactivate" code? Your experiement worked. Setting up Coulter as a sort of Republican Howard Campbell Jr. was fun, and you pulled it off, but please read the rest of Vonnegut's "Mother Night". You are what you pretend to be.

Sounding exactly like the supposedly bitchy "in-crowd" that Jeffries markets so successfully to, the personal attacks comprising 100% of the posts so far, and much of the article, would be amusing if they weren't so darn sad.

It's just marketing, people. It's not remotely scary. It doesn't have any chance of messing up anyone's life. And, in the case of the 'controversial' t-shirts, it's utterly hilarious that anyone at all would find that sort of intentionally faux-gasp sophomoric stuff offensive.

With really offensive things in the world, like tax cuts for the rich, and a murderous resource war perpetrated by the richest country in the world, you people have some "I'm terribly offended" juice left over for A&F!? Give me a break.

So the "in" crowd need their little uniforms to cover up the gaping emptiness inside. So Jeffries is getting rich selling crap to the colourless -- ain't that the American dream?

What is it about A&F and Mike Jeffries that really bothers you? Their "you must conform to rebel" clothes? His white teeth? Or is there a deeper unease that you're trying to cover up here? Something about runaway consumerism and a never-really-left-high-school desperation to be part of a tribe -- any tribe? Grow up, already!

"Uncool" people bitching about A&F is what drives their marketing, a point that the article's author (almost) got. It allows them to maintain their "the cool get it, everyone else doesn't" pose. So, by all means, get on board!

Or, if you've really got the cahones, take a long, hard look at what you're really catting on about.

Surely we're well past the point, as a reading public, where the words "a memoir" or indeed "based on a true story" indicate anything but a slight frisson of "extra believability juice" added to the entirely fictional mix inside the covers of a novel.

Here's a hint: factual books provide footnotes listing articles, papers, other books. Factual books exist in a very specific and carefully guarded world of review and peer criticism. Factual books, with rare exceptions, don't read like novelised movie scripts and become bestsellers.

James Frey, like all those before him to fall foul of the idiotic "but you said it was true!!!" brigade wrote a NOVEL. Novels are fiction.

The fact that the author claims to have "lived the story" described on the pages of any novel is simply another marketing twist, as any intelligent person who as ever seen Frey live (or even just on Oprah) would immediately guess with no further evidence.

Frey is a novelist. Novelists make things up. I can't help wondering if not a small portion of the shame the gullible will now try to heap upon Frey is simply ire at being fooled by such transparent fiction.