You weren't looking for heavy meaning in Revenge of the Nerds or Fired Up or those Fascist Saw movies you all glommed onto. What made you think you'd hear any of that in a Ron Howard exploration of Catholic conspiracies?

I went to this movie because friends wanted to see it. I was not looking forward to it. It was difficult to suspend belief about this piece of tripe, but I managed it, and found a modestly entertaining TV-movie. (For which I had to pay $9 a head, sadly.) I've paid for worse movies.

You want something intellectual and interesting? Go find it on Bittorrent. Don't expect Hollywood to release anything like that, especially during the summer. And don't expect to find the smart stuff at your local multiplex, because movie exhibitors are idiots.

Yahoos out there believe all this nonsense, especially the nonsense that this Terry bozo, Alan Keyes and the Catholic Church are right.

The sexual revolution is over, and sex lost. Oh, it mumbles and complains on, the same way that Southerners grumble over the Civil War and the natural superiority of the South, and how the War for the Confederacy wasn't really about racism and the like. (The same thing is said among the Sex Losers about how prostitution doesn't destroy women and demean men - an argument made by feminists, of all people.) But nobody believes what anybody says about sex.

So, take joy in every child that's born, whether in or out of wedlock. Of course, once the little bastard is out of the uterus, let him or her die of neglect, starvation or drug abuse, because it just costs too much to care about them after birth. Accept the miracle of birth and forget about what happens afterward.

You just have to avoid your triggering impulses and get the hell out of the way. PTSD is hard-wired into the brain after the traumatizing experience. There is no psychiatric treatment, besides death, that can cure it.

For that matter, psychiatrists can't cure anything. They can get you to a point where you can get along with your paralyzing situation, but they can't cure it.

I suffer PTSD - self-analyzed, not confirmed by a shrink or anything - based on a robbery and near-rape I had about sixteen years ago. I used to enjoy doing role playing games with my friends. In the course of one of the games, I missed a "saving throw" and became a zombie, and killed another player's character.

It was "all good fun" for the others. But I couldn't sleep afterwards and I had to drop out of the whole gaming thing, losing my friends in the group. They understood, but they didn't understand. And many of them are still heavily into horror and violence.

I found that by avoiding the triggering impulses, which are primarily sadism, torture and cruelty, I would not get the coldness in my bones and a growing cynicism and anger. This makes me something of a pariah in the gaming, science fiction and fantasy communities.

It's also made me cynical about the nature of human beings, especially young people who thrive on this stuff. I see it making our entire society indifferent to suffering. It's fairly well known that science fiction is a medium dominated by conservative thought and philosophy. But now I see many of the popular movies and entertainments as pushing a fascist philosophy of cruelty, dominance and sadism. What the hell were these Saw movies about if not an appreciation of fetishist murder?

And I know that the people who got PTSD in a more painful fashion than I did, the soldiers returning from Bush's war for oil, must have some truly horrid reactions to this popularization of sadism. Another good reason for staying the hell out of theaters that play this stuff; if one of these guys is packing heat and gets triggered in the theater, the red stuff that will be spilled there won't be Karo syrup and food coloring.

Good. Now perhaps someone can write something that doesn't sound like an eternal funeral. Hell, I'd even tolerate Elephantman repeating everything Rush Limbaugh says.

An' da reason I'm talkin' in dis phony Chico Marx accent, boss, is 'cause da show I-a call Losers is a scam my-a little-a brain thought up.

This show was over when the doctor (I don't remember his name and I don't care) refused to kill the two minions of the guy running Dharma, Dr. Fu Manchu, by letting the underwater prison flood. He saved the lives of the bastards that were imprisoning him. That told me there was no heroism and no direction in this show; like daytime soap operas, the producers and writers just want to keep the soup bubbling on the stove, not do anything like serve their soup to nourish your soul.

Losers is what James Blish once called "a hole within a hole inside a hole." The Great Nothing, in other words. Not a mystery hiding in the dark to be discovered, but a bottomless pit waiting to kill your soul.

And in Ed Asner's immortal words, I hate cute.

Seeing the saner heads reacting to Cheney's stupid old-school Bush reactions, Keillor felt the need to say something and to try to give it something of a comic spin. He was always better off making fun of fictional small-town biscuit bakeries than handling the big issues.

I give him credit for trying to extend his writing into something more meaningful, but perhaps he should do some stretches first.