Thank you. It's not surprising that there are so few comments on this article (or that the knuckle-grazers haven't shown up yet). The pictures speak for themselves - volumes - and are indeed depressing. I'm glad Mr. Schmidt see-saws like the rest of us from hope to despair - seems like a very sensible way to respond to overwhelming implications.

Win-win works best - solving related problems with efficiency and elegance (green-commerce helping to jump-start the economy, like the Texas farmer who combines traditional values with wind-farm profits, leaping clear over political spin).

To the first poster: acknowledging the problem is the first and best step any of us can take. You're doing your part. Supporting government/industry's immediate action only takes a voice and a vote, and a sober awareness that we're all in this together.

I've lived half my life in California and the other half in Louisiana. For years I've tried to figure out which state's political system is weirder. Louisiana has its laissez-faire relationship with the incarceration of government officials - if they just serve their time, we can elect them again! - as well as a corner on the market for backwards social legislation.

California however has THE strangest method of governing I've ever seen - the Proposition Game. Not only do the voters get to decide issues that have significant economic impact, and then completely ignore the upshot in the very next election, but the Propositions themselves are, across the board, models of disinformation and media manipulation. Who knows WHAT is being voted on. Many people do struggle to inform themselves, but I'll guarantee the average media-saturated voter doesn't have a clue what's being proposed. And most importantly - is a vote of yes a vote for or against what I want?

It's no wonder this beautiful state is careening from generosity to misanthropy. We voted for both!

It's absolutely astonishing that Ms. Paglia can blithely dissect the President's speech in Cairo without once mentioning the oracular giants desperate to drag this nation's discourse into demonization - of Obama, and of the entire Muslim world (for starters). Camille, darling, you do know who pushes the xenophobic envelope around here, don't you? Hint: initials RL, AC, SH, BO'R, etc.

Maybe it's time you turned your professorial parsing towards the rest of the class. You've been very clear on OB's perceived communication flubs; try taking on the goons in the back row, the ones who are beating up on all the ethnic groups they can get their hands on.

Or are you so myopic that you don't see past the real achievers?

"NOTE: I will be speaking on "Hollywood and the Bible" at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on the evening of Tuesday, June 16. My appearance is part of a lecture series accompanying the museum's summer and fall exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Note taken: I will be avoiding you like an ancient plague.

everything is true. When Rush says the following, vis a vis SUPPORTING the AIC bonuses:

"A lynch mob is expanding: the peasants with their pitchforks surrounding the corporate headquarters of AIG, demanding heads. Death threats are pouring in. All of this being ginned up by the Obama administration,"

there is very little difference in the message between crowds picking up pitchforks against AIC, and dittoheads picking up weapons against Obama. It's all in the way you filter the basic impulse to act out against what threatens. Does Rush's audience, in general, have less filters for their free-form rage and fear? Is it stirred up by Rush's constant use of apocalyptic-sexual imagery? Is radio itself, in its innate lack of contradictory visual input, an effective tool for bypassing critical awareness and judgement?

Duh.

To see Glen Beck start to use dream-like imagery behind his bizarre rants is to see the opening of a new window on American discourse - a consciously manipulated appeal to the unconscious dissatisfactions - of a minority mind you - at the edge of the electorate.

We're in the midst of a sea change. Obama is a direct representation of our country's attempt to incorporate and "process" a new wave of immigrants (Asian, Hispanic, Indian, even Muslim), just as it did a hundred-odd years ago with Italian, German, Irish, etc. settlers, and therefore to connect further with the world at large. The Anglo Man is rightfully threatened that his hegemony is over. It is. And that leads to tumult and displacement: illegal immigrants are THE SAME as 911 terrorists; Obama lived in a Muslim country, so he is.

The right-wing is free to acknowledge the inevitable tumult, and their part in fanning the unavoidable embers of deep-set racial and economic fear. I fully believe the shock-jocks and Fox-jocks are aware of what they're doing - their part in violence and manipulated unrest. But A) it's their livelihood, and B) it's having an effect.

They will not change, unless someone acts as the "adult" - point out the problem in clear, simple analogies. Thank you Joan, and anybody else who stands up to unchecked bigotry and bullying, for the effort.

I love the "director of research" explaining the importance of "bookend" plot devices. You know - especially meaningful in this movie because they come at the

".....beginning....." and ".......the end......"

awesome.