"the Obama camp does play up the cult of personality a bit (....The Classical columns in Denver?)"

If his image had been emblazoned on all of the columns, or on each piece of confetti, or on every seat back in the stadium, maybe.

But Greco-Roman iconography is part and parcel of our public life, our architecture, our government. The columns said stately, said presidential, said serious. It was totally appropriate and not remotely Maoist, Titoist or Stalinist. This cult of personality accusation is bunk.

Hmmm, if this is an example of great dialogue or a great moment, then the movie is likely to be even worse than I suspected, and worse than the review makes it sound:

He informs his men that he wants, "100 Gnatzi scalps!" After a pause, he adds, "And I want my scalps!" After one last beat comes the capper: "Or you will die tryin'!"

Joan, it's not a slow-motion crackup. He's doing what many people do who have been profoundly humiliated: he's bathing in shame, even drowning in it, as an unconscious way to free himself of it (check out this book http://tiny.cc/MrCWi). As an unconscious strategy, it's paradoxical and painful, and sadly for all of us, he seems to think it's the only way through the morass.

It's great to see Salon review a book that hasn't been published by one of the big trade houses. Can more indie/university press titles be next? As a reader, reviewer, and author, I hope so.

--Michiko Kakutani years ago panned John L'Heureux's book Comedians. I went right out and bought and loved it. Her bad review made the book sound fascinating, and it was.

--I gave Richard Ford's A Mutltitude of Sins a mixed review, but we don't travel in the same circles, so I guess I'm lucky.

--The wife of a writer friend stopped him from firing off a protest to a reviewer by saying, "Do you want to be acknowledged for your craft or known as a maniac?"

--Any author feeling the urge to savage a critic should read Bech at Bay where Updike's hero goes after some of his reviewers. Sweet catharsis.

--Pope said this about reviewers: "Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss"

Dear Something Stinks:

The show is set in SE Michigan so I was hoping to like it and hoping it does well (though those aren't the same thing).

I gave it 45 minutes, fully prepared to enjoy it.

As for bigger TVs, I have a 54-inch screen and if the actor had truly been hung (or even outfitted to look it), that would have been obvious.

Capisce?

Watched the show. Big problem: the lead is not hung. Not remotely. Not in jeans, not in dress slacks, not in sweat pants, not in jockey shorts. Spoils what little fun there might be in a dim-witted show that's poorly written, bland, and cursed with lame voiceover. Critics will rave because they'll consider it "daring." It might have been. In the 80s.

Did they have to put "dreck" in his name? Is this some kind of scriptwriter's juju to ward off bad reviews?

Essential reading for anyone disturbed by this report is Chalmers Johnson's magisterial and terrifying trilogy analyzing our current political state: Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis.

His core argument: the U.S. is no longer a Republic but a militarized empire with vast network of colonies. The military budget brutally distorts our economy and militarization perverts our politics. No President will ever relinquish powers accrued by previous presidents, and will likely seek to further their invidious reach. Despite positive signs (which I'd call fleas jumping on a corpse) The Republic is dead, without hope of rescusitation.

I won't bother seeing this one, which sounds woefully miscast. As was The Age of Innocence, where she was a disaster. Ellen Olenska in Wharton's novel is bosomy, exotic, dark, and very European. She smolders. Pfeiffer just looked like a Victorian Valentine and made the movie as off-balance as Wynona Ryder did, given that Archer's wife is a Diana figure in the book: blond, tall, dynamic.

Hélas! I did love "Dangerous Liaisons," but Michelle Pfeiffer could not pronounce "Monsieur," and it drove me nuts having grown up with a French-speaking parent and taken French in school depuis huit ans. Pfeiffer kept saying something like "mush-errr." Each time she said it, it knocked me out of the film.

Yes, he was human, vulnerable, shame-ridden. Does he or will he realize the utter hypocrisy of his voting to impeach Clinton? Will he say so if he does? Does he realize while he's been putting his own needs above the needs of his family and his state that he actively worked against his constituents' interests by rejecting federal stimulus money, and that he undermined security and good governance by disappearing for almost a week? I grant he was human, but I wonder how long it'll last. The GOP is the normative party: rules matter more than people. Will he see that people often matter more than rules, and that extends outside himself? Will he realize how arbitrary and difficult he's been even before this affair? Or will he become even more rigid as a reaction formation against his own impulses. Given the kinds of people attracted to the GOP, my bet is the latter.

"and it's Katja bar the door."

GLR, put stock in whatever you like. It in no way negates the power of what the U.N. High Commissioner for Civil Rights said in comparing laws restricting civil rights for gays to apartheid.


United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay said: "Just like apartheid laws that criminalized sexual relations between different races, laws against homosexuality are increasingly becoming recognized as anachronistic and inconsistent both with international law and with traditional values of dignity, inclusion, and respect for all."