In fact, I had a little difficulty following what the problem was when Olbermann was apologizing for it. It reminds me of the time when some in the black community went berserk because a writer had used the word "niggardly" -- and then half the white community agreed to stop using it!

There may be sexism directed at Hillary, I don't doubt it. But I don't think it's nearly as much a factor in her negatives right at this moment as the nastiness of her campaign, engineered by Bill. People are blaming both of them, so even that has few sexist overtones.

I think women are going to have the same sensitivities about their sex as blacks will have about their race until those factors have so completely disappeared from our culture that nobody can remember them as factors. It doesn't help that cable and network broadcast jobs are going to blonde bimbos instead of those a bit less likely to be hired by Playboy.

As for me, you'll always have an edge, not just because of obvious your talent. I just really dig tall chicks.

OK, Mark Penn showed his ass, but he may have been intending what was in fact expressed during the later primaries: that if Hillary shows greater strength in the big states, especially swing states like Ohio and Florida, than Obama, then she stands a better chance of winning in the fall. It makes sense.

But it only goes so far. This is a year in which America is trying to reclaim its soul. The antipathy toward Bush is so strong that it can only mean that large numbers of people feel they were led down the primrose path, that they were lied to about the war and so many other things. And the race of Obama, while it offers a reason for bigots to have a blood feast, is a moral challenge to others who know they hold some manner of racial bias but want to get beyond it in this special year. And John McCain, decent man thought he is, is giving off signs of not having a mental grasp of things, and of being obsessively committed to an earlier war and not the one he is facing now.

The original idea of the child porn laws was to prevent children from being involved in actual sexual acts for the purpose of taking photographs or movies.

But the law went considerably farther, and you can get serious jail time for Photoshopping naked kids into sexual positions, or even depicting child sex in cartoons. The only thing this does is prevent people from thinking naughty thoughts. So we're back to that.

And it's too much. If you're old enough to remember the famous Coppertone suntan lotion ad, with the cartoon of the little 3-year-old topless girl at the beach with her panty being pulled down by a puppy, showing her tan line -- that was a regular fixture in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post for decades.

But no more. We could all do jail time for even possessing it.

My, what a confessional moment: "compiling complicated analyses of deeply trivial televised entertainments, I can be like a beacon unto all of the overeducated but ultimately shallow and unfocused young people out there."

If that's how you really feel about your work, it's time to stop doing it.

Perhaps it would be helpful for you to go back and take a course in the basics of aesthetics and literature. It's connecting with other human beings in a way which is rich for them, even though the mode of expression is not always the most profound. If you can't see the beauty of both Bach and Brown (James), you're narrow-minded.

But that's not all of it, is it? You're having a "Tonio Kröger" experience, Thomas Mann's character who is torn between his artistic nature and his bourgeois upbringing. You can't quite decide that what you do is serious enough work, can you? That probably means it isn't. And your curse will be that if you do go into "serious" work, you will forever be drawn to the fun and charm of the other path.

Poor you. But people are dying in Baghdad, so try to work it out on your own time.