that insightful explication of why she's a fraud is really convincing.

What's the evidence for the medication, and in what way was her cure sited as a miracle to begin with? What sources are you relying on for either assertion? Why shouldn't she take the money she could get to help people? (Does anyone anywhere refuse this, religious or not? Do hospitals/colleges/social service programs only take donations from morally upright people? Shouldn't they?)Are you in a position to judge who is morally fit? If she pretended to be, wouldn't you then just criticize her for having a judgemental nature and not having the open heart a Christian is supposed to have?

And, REALLY THE ISSUE HERE, she's one person. How about John Paul II helping Jews to escape the Nazis, or backing Solidarity? Even more to the point, how about the people we see around us in our lives everyday?

That's the problem with honing in on Mother Theresa. Even if you can prove your assertions (and I don't think you can, I think it is likely to remain a gray area), there are countless priests, nuns, and lay Christians who don't fit your description.

Ours is a culture constantly building mirages and then trying to peek behind them. Reality TV, backstage industry dish, "just like us" photos of celebrities -- we want simultaneously to be dazzled by fantasies and assured of authenticity, and here was a nightmare that collapsed the two and then smashed our faces in it.

What the hell does that last phrase mean? I don't deny the depiction of modern American society, but how on earth does 9-11 embody it? What was the fantasy that had been concocted? How was the World Trade Center a peak behind the curtain? It makes no sense to me, at all.

And while I guess Miller would know whether or not newspaper/magazine editors spoke the name DeLillo from the moment the tragedy happened, thinking for whatever reason that he was the writer to bring profundity to the moment (and this is her assertion; she isn't claiming the rest of us had any such thoughts), I can't figure out why they did. Was he really a better choice than Mailer or Vidal or, if we must put the old guys out to pasture and keep to the icons of more recent vintage, David Foster Wallace or Douglas Coupland? I mean, they're all trained observers of the zeitgeist, American edition.

Maybe it comes from my suspicion of genre fiction, and of an outlook which expects a genre writer is the one best equipped to provide the profound thoughts of an era. That's not what genre writers do. It isn't what they're for. (Can you imagine suffering the WWII bombings in England and desperately wondering how Agatha Christie was going to put it all together so it finally made sense to you?) If DeLillo, why not Stephen King? He writes horror, and this was really, really horrible, right? Makes sense, right?

Of course not.