They got the person's money. That's all the college wants. If they can invalidate the woman's degree, and force her to pay more money down the line to try to get a teaching certificate...well, isn't that what a college supposed to do? Squeeze as much money out of the suckers as possible?

Especially this college, which sounds like one of those tiny Christian-dominated colleges that supposedly enforces "morality" on its students. Much like the IRS's philosophy of tax prosecution, having a body of a "disgraced student" swinging from the top of the administration building is a good way to keep the rest of the student body in line.

Mr. Silverman, it looks like you drank the Kool-Aid.

However, as the everlasting aspirations pass through your mind as you die, take comfort in the fact that you're not alone. The people of Kansas voted overwhelmingly for the Bush Family Evil Empire and their corporate backers. The result: when they needed their National Guard to dig out from their flooding, all the get are death notices of their kids dying for George Bush's oil.

And they're okay with that, just like you are.

The leaders of the Democratic Party allowed Bush to ravage and rape the American people. They figured, "well, it'll be a little while longer, maybe they'll come back to vote for us in droves." And so they refused to fight the BFEE effectively. Why bother? Their stock portfolios were doing extremely well, including Clinton's. Teddy Kennedy could afford his houses and his booze and his whores. So all the Democrats in Congress donned their Pink Tutus and danced lovely pirhouettes around Daddy Dubya.

They were just fine with the dead and the unemployed, just like you are.

Mind you, I don't blame you personally. Everybody's given up. There is no hope or even the imagining of hope. Our popular media are just the dance band on the Titanic, keeping people merry as they drown. Even the so-called counterculture people have surrendered to the black wave of death.

The real reason for the end of the United States might be something as simple as the inability to dream, and to believe enough in a dream to work for it.

That's where the jobs are for all those "trained craftsmen" Ms. Paglia wants teens to become. Or (to echo another letter writer) hasn't she been reading Salon?

I don't quite understand her. She is supposedly a lesbian libertarian, if I recall her past writing correctly. Since libertarians are further to the right than even the Bush Family Evil Empire, isn't that like being a member of "Jews for Hitler"? They'll gladly take her support and money, and she'll be the first to be tied to a burning cross when they take over.

I don't resent Ms. Paglia, mind you; her philosophies just don't make much sense to me. However, I'd have no objections to her replacing the truly reprehensible Heather Havrilesky as TV columnist. At least Paglia seems to have watched TV for real, and she has a range of interests beyond the flavor of the month at Starbuck's.

...you probably can tell yourself from the others.

The have/have not dichotomy is going to get worse, especially when Bush finally crashes the economy. And (since I presume you're a rich yuppie who's afraid to be known, thus the lame "anonymous" tag) you'll be using your Silver Spoons cookbook as a shield when the poor and hungry finally break into your house.

It seems that a lot of you are making food to impress other people with your taste. It's probably a waste of time to suggest food that offers nutrition and flavor. And for the other "Anonymous," someone just as cowardly - the only difference between chocolate mousse and chocolate pudding is more air whipped in and less sugar. It tastes like chocolate-flavored whipped automobile paste wax. You prize that crap?

Thanks, Baron Dave Romm, for the insight. But I'd take it further. Science fiction might be fiction for nerds, but nerds are affected by the same social pressures as people who do have satisfactory sex lives and almost-sufficent salaries. (I've heard there are such people, somewhere.)

The 1950's monster and alien films were created in the worries about the atomic bomb and Communism, fears which were not only present, but heavily promoted by Republicans and even further-right conservatives.

While the space technology seemed to inspire optimism in the early 60's, it was the general feel that there were new optimistic forces in the world that made that decade's science fiction so much brighter. None of the kids who dropped acid were nerds, but even nerds could hear the Beatles, even though we couldn't dance to them. And the doom and desperation of the Vietnam War and Nixon darkened science fiction at the end of the decade; films like Colossus: The Forbin Project and Logan's Run were about all the future we had left.

Star Wars: A New Hope didn't occur in a vacuum, either; it embodied the optimism of Reagan and of the post-Vietnam conservative world, where it looked like the right wing would accept gays and disco, and nobody was going to hunt down and kill former hippies in the street.

And right now? Americans can't really accept that we made massive mistakes, beginning with Bush and continuing on through global warming. Our science fiction reflects that sense of despair, with monsters in 28 Days Later, insane corporations in The Terminator and the paranoia of Lost letting us feel the depression and despair we need to feel, while helping us forget that we're responsible for the crap visited upon us. And much of that evil seems unconquerable; megacorporations controlling all we see, hear and think; a war without end; AIDS; the fact that Heather Havrilesky is still getting paid by Salon.

But maybe a new President, enforced antitrust laws and sudden expanded consciousness on the part of Salon's editors can turn that around, and we'll have optimistic science fiction again.