My goodness, a Queen grows in the Air Force Academy. You GO girl! BTW, LOVE Video Dog!

I agree with some of the other commentators here that some background would have been helpful, if only to flesh out the interesting ambivalence in the Leroy Charade. "His" two principle works, "Sarah" and "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Thing," both present a searing picture of American life, motherhood, family, sexuality, and survival. The stories are incredibly visceral, involving abuses of various sorts and the moral, ethical, and spiritual survival of a young man thrown to the wolves through drugs, sex work, violence, and terror. The fact that it is fictional doesn't necessarily undermine the message of the work, but it does reveal something disturbing about our seemingly collective desire for verisimilitude in the genre of memoir, already remarked upon eloquently by other commentators here and in the piece in New York Magazine.

I think what Waldman might be reaching for here is something I have been feeling as I have pondered this tempest in a literary teapot, which is primarily ambivalence: a sort of "OK, but so what?" But perhaps that is grounded in my own skepticism of any truth narrative, even in genre forms that are avowdedly about truth (for example, memoir, or documentary). Perhaps unlike others, I wasn't reading Leroy because it was "true." Rather, the scenarios of Leroy were powerful for me as a reader because they were in the realm of the horribly possible (contra one of the writers here, I did not think the stories are the coastal vision of flyover America, although there are aspects of that in the *reception* of the work, most certainly).

This moment seems fraught on so many levels, yet I have been feeling increasingly annoyed by the tone of the coverage, which tends towards rabid anti-Muslim sentiment, or bending over backwards to explain and situate the anger of the protests against these cartoons. Both responses seem to me to miss the point completely, and perhaps speak to our own crisis in the West over defending our purported shared values around freedom of expression (aka speech).

The history of this freedom in the West has been tortured, and debate continues around appropriate limits, if any, to expressive discontent or critique. Yet, arguably since Luther tacked his list on the church door, the West has been engaged in separating, on some level, religion and civil society. This has allowed (rockily, unevenly, tendentiously) for the emergence of particular ideas and modes of critique to emerge in the West that, while controversial in and of themselves, reflect this particular history of dissent and distance between religiousity and citizenship. Now we are confronted by other societies with different views on these questions.

Which is fine for them, if firstly it were truly a democratic impluse and secondly not some reaction to Western modernity itself. But I have been feeling obstinate on this matter: that we shouldn't and cannot give a bloody inch in this debate. Yes, the cartoons for the most part were childish; Yes, the paper that originally published them was pursuing some quasi anti-Muslim sentiment; Yes, similar depictions of Christianity were refused by the publisher. But, as someone elsewhere has said regarding this controversy (I am paraphrasing madly here): Freedom of Expression is exactly the act of thumbing one's nose in the face of social and cultural authority, be that the state or religion. Was the electric chair and Jesus joke offensive? Perhaps. Is it in poor taste? I guess that depends on your taste. But someone won't be thrown in jail for three years because of it. This is a hard won right that globally only some of us can hold, and is not to be thrown over for crowds of angry, bitter people who won't like you any more even if you honor the prophet. We are in the realm of symbolic values that speak to other, more material conditions rather than the rules of representing or not-representing Mohammad. That seems to be so beyond the point that it is almost comic to see it discussed with any seriousness.

So, between sensibilties of sensitivity and an awkward, raw, and sometimes untoward freedom of expression, I choose the latter. The forces propelling this conservative religiousity, both here among Christians and Jews and there among Muslims (the vaunted "street") represent the worst parochialism of the pre-modern age. They are the intolerant, barbaric values of the tribe and clan. They are opposed to the cosmopolitan, secular, and urbane modalities of life which many of us depend on for our very existence, represented most viscerally by the murder of Theo Van Gogh. This is not a game or an intellectual question, this is for real.

If anything, that is the true "clash of civilizations," and the battlegrounds are here as well as in some other dusty there, whether through angry crowds burning consulates, the rise of "intelligent" design, or the ceaseless invocation of God by our public officials. Once this was considered indiscreet. Now it is de rigeur. It is high time for those of us who cherish and honor the values of the cosmopolitan meeting place around the world to join together in vigorously resisting and defending against both a simplistic cultural relativism as well as the very tangible danger this fanatacism represents to our way of life, which for all its faults remains, in my mind, superior to living under theocracy or provincial pastoralism.

What? Did I miss something? The First Lady smokes? Mrs. "Let's Bake" gets down with some ciggies and a good bourbon? Right on! I like her a lot more now.