I am fully cognizant of everything you are saying, RM, and, while I agree with you, I still stand by what I said. Please, don't take my town versus gown, state versus private school rant as anything other than glib irony. I took a B.A. in psychology from a Freudian college which entailed four years of arduous study and the best advice I ever got was from Vladimir Nabokov who said: "Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts."

We do need to, however, look squarely at our myths, norms, mores and institutions and hold them up to ridicule as Nabokov did. I might have mentioned this before but in the late '60s to early '70s there was this guy, a Dr. Nork, who had the dubious distinction of being America's leading malpractitioner. This surgeon was so bad with his scalpel that when he sent his specimens to the lab the pathologists had difficulty identifying them as they just weren't use to seeing healthy tissue: Dr. Nork cut out everything and, according to one source: "he lost two malpractice suits for a total 41 million." I don't know the outcome of the other, at least, 40 million he was sued for. One of the reasons for the large judgments, staggering sums for the time, was to send a ripple through society and hold accountable, if only indirectly, the self-same institutions that created the monster.

Pernell Roberts quit the runaway hit Bonanza at the height of its run "criticizing the show's simple-minded content and lack of minority actors..." Please tell me how the government "lights" I mentioned above aren't subject to the same fatigue from running their tired scripts on us. Well, at least in war there is no dearth of minority actors. In today's 21st Century Military we are availing ourselves of the fruits of modernity with tools like Ratheon's TALON Laser-Guided Rocket (LGR). This missile: "TALON provides an effective weapon against soft to lightly armored point targets while reducing potential collateral damage. Moreover, its precision standoff range results in improved platform survivability." And as for minority actors? Well they are the next brown tribe on the "7 in 5" target list, of course. And how can anyone who is presently in the military and is senior enough to have a chest full of fruit salad take any of this seriously or feel any pride or accomplishment in fighting wars to dubious conclusions with rag-tag countries populated by Asians, or Arabs with GNPs in the toilet?

You touched on, directly or indirectly, the topic of political polarity. You mentioned leftists and Michael Parenti who I think is a leftist; I think he stylizes himself as a socialist but you can't have any kind of polarity without a dialectic. Abby Hoffman said: "how can I say 'I love you' in a culture that says 'I love my car'?" How can you have a dialectic in a country where someone says: "it depends on what your definition of is, is?" That was said by a Rhodes Scholar by the way.

No, I don't think that the "elites" are inept. I fully expect them to launch the "Kosovo Protocols"* against Syria. But I do think they will look damn silly doing so in a sort of 280 pound Herman Goering wearing a self-designed powder blue uniform sort of way. I don't know how long all of this can go on. There are real signs of the system breaking down under its own weight. The main stream media is dead: NPR just lost another CEO, CIA connected Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, Newsweek is dead, Pacifica is embattled, No Agenda's Adam Curry played a clip of Rachel Maddow stating that "more people heard the clip on his show than on the original airing of MSNBC," Chris Matthews morphed into Sean Hannity and on and on.

But we are not talking about a "leftist" criticizing elites here. We are talking about a transvaluation of all values here, in the Nietzchian sense, and that doesn't come without alarm and ridicule. Birgitta Jónsdóttir the Pirate Party representative to the Althing, Iceland's Parliament, has recently stated: " All the structures we thought would take care of us, be it systems, ideologies, religion, politics or institutions are failing." So, as Jónsdóttir says, all our institutions are failing and the actors we see on stage are playing a farce with Tartuffian bombast and deserve all of our contempt and ridicule: John Yoo is a law professor teaching constitutional law at Berkeley; professor, my ass.

*Kosovo Protocols, curtesy of John C. Dvorak of The No Agenda Show