As King Solomon once said, "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity." The significance of any individual or any individual's actions is greatly over-estimated, so it's no wonder that the significance of a TV show should be inflated. It is perhaps more notable that anyone should think it significant to point out that TV shows are just a lot of blather. Trying to make meaningful distinctions about crap is just a variation on coprophilia.

Nevertheless, we spend an inordinate amount of our lives trying to make such distinctions, and some of us even earn our livings from such scatalogical careers as TV critics. It may come as a surprise, but never has a show about firemen rushing into a burning building to save a dying infant and his puppy actually run into a burning building to save anyone. Neither has a quirky drama about the presidency ever sent a single person off to die in an unjust war. And, to my knowledge, never has a TV critic ever saved a person from wasting his or her life by watching a lot of meaningless, melodramatic, serio-comic flotsam flitter across the television screen.

Ms. Havrilesky's talent for interweaving social comment and TV criticism is real. She easily floats a lot of clever ideas on a fast moving river, and she does it with style and urbane wit. But there is a danger that she might be taking her own ideas as seriously as the Macy's balloons of inflated egotism she is attempting to deflate.

Perhaps she should submit a "concept" for a show about a TV critic who works for a whacky little internet 'zine (does anyone use that term, anymore?) and the controversies she attempts to conflate with her own career while ironically seeming to dismiss them with her barbed cynicism. Chances are it could work.

Let's see, a Southern boy of a certain age that substantially predates the civil-rights movement claims never to have used that word? I'm going to jump way out on a limb, here, and bet that he's lying.

For one thing, it would have been impossible for a Southern kid to have picked among things, since a very familiar rhyme was almost essential in making such choices, and it went

Eeny, meeny, mighny, moe, catch a n*gger by his toe ...

So Allen never used that little rhyme? And Allen never, ever called Brazil nuts "n*gger-toes"? And he never, ever called a duct-taped muffler "n*gger-rigged"?

I apologize to those who may be offended by these references, but they were as much a part of Southern vernacular as "Ya'll," when I was a kid. It didn't mean that we all grew up to be racist, but it is just ridiculous to claim never to have used it.

Everyone knows this, and everyone must now decide whether Allen's bald-faced lie shows a serious lack of character.

Watching the debates on this legislation, today, was one of the most demoralizing experiences of my life. There were moments of real heroic rhetoric from Senator Leahy, but the sniveling moral cowardice of Senators Graham and Warner was disgusting. We have arrived at a moment of humiliating shame in the history of this republic.

This is what comes of letting fear rule our nation. The people cower with every mention of terrorists, not realizing that the only terror they will probably ever experience is the very dread that infects there lives right now. The president and his cynical goons are squeezing the life, liberty and any hope of happiness out of this country. We are as certainly under the jackboot of tyranny as any country we have ever looked down on.

The Democrats are no better. They scatter like vermin at the slightest noise. They shame us with their obsequious lassitude. Weakness is what they fear, and as if on cue they exhibit it with every opportunity.

We are approaching an election of real importance. If we return the Republican police-state to power, people will suffer and die needlessly. The poor will increase. The infirm and the disenfranchised will be abandoned and exploited. The rich will hoard and hide their wealth abroad. We know this is true. It has been borne out in the past six years, leaving us without doubt of the seriousness of our situation.

Yet, the Democrats give us little reason for hope. They are like so many Uriah Heaps -- fish-pawed grovelers, standing for nothing but their own offices. Torture, show trials, incarceration without access to the courts. Where will it end? What will be too much? Anything? This is the tyranny of the spineless.

If these people will not stand up, now, when every nerve, tendon, and muscle should be rigid with resolve, then we have nothing to hope for in the election. Even if the Democrats take control of the congress, they will find the next thing to fear, the next election to warily anticipate, the next shame to embrace.

We think that we are at the very end of a tunnel, but it looks more and more like we are really just paralyzed with fear, and the train is coming hard and fast.