As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors' offices. They'll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.

A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices: portability of health insurance across state lines. What covert business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping consumers from shopping for policies nationwide? Finally, no healthcare bill is worth the paper it's printed on when the authors ostentatiously exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan. Hypocrites!

And why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It's as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies. Republicans, on the other hand, have basically sat on their asses about healthcare reform for the past 20 years and have shown little interest in crafting legislative solutions to social inequities. The usual GOP floater about private medical savings accounts is a crock -- something that, given the astronomical costs of major medical crises, would be utterly unworkable for families of even average household income.

International models of socialized medicine have been developed for nations and populations that are usually vastly smaller than our own. There are positives and negatives in their system as in ours. So what's the point of this trade? The plight of the uninsured (whose number is far less than claimed) should be directly addressed without co-opting and destroying the entire U.S. medical infrastructure. Limited, targeted reforms can ban gouging and unfair practices and can streamline communications now wastefully encumbered by red tape. But insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry are not the sole cause of mounting healthcare costs, and constantly demonizing them is a demagogic evasion.

How dare anyone claim humane aims for this bill anyhow when its funding is based on a slashing of Medicare by over $400 billion? The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable. One would have expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare, certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind.

Last week's startling gubernatorial victories by Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey were routinely dismissed as local aberrations by the liberal media or inflated as referendums on President Obama by the conservative media. But voters were clearly revolting against the deranged excess spending of government at both state and federal levels. So it was as much a protest against Congress as against the White House.

Obama sure needed a lift and got it from Pelosi. The administration has seemed to be drifting lately. Obama has dithered for months about a strategy for Afghanistan -- another rats' nest we should pull our troops out of overnight. Then there was the bizarre disproportion in Obama's flying to Denmark to flog a Chicago Olympics yet not having time to make it to Germany to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall -- which suggests a frivolous provincialism as well as ignorance of history among the president's principal advisors. And Obama's muted response to last week's massacre at Fort Hood has exposed ambiguities and uncertainties in the U.S. government and military about how to respond to homegrown militant Islam. The presidency is a heavy burden -- a prize that can become a curse.

On other matters, I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR. I assumed it was some fussy, gossipy opera expert fresh from London. To my astonishment, it was Richard Dawkins, the thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists. I had never heard him speak, so it was a revelation. On science, Dawkins was spot on -- lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went "Psycho" weird (yes, Alfred Hitchcock) -- as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat. I have no idea what ancient private dramas bubble beneath the surface there. As an atheist who respects and studies religion, I believe it is fair to ask what drives obsessive denigrators of religion. Neither extreme rationalism nor elite cynicism are adequate substitutes for faith, which fulfills a basic human need -- which is why religion will continue to thrive in our war-torn world.

Continuing on the theme of overrated male writers, I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week. The New York Times, for example, first posted an alert calling him "the father of modern anthropology" (a claim demonstrating breathtaking obliviousness to the roots of anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and then published a lengthy, laudatory obituary that was a string of misleading, inaccurate or incomplete statements. It is ludicrous to claim that Lévi-Strauss single-handedly transformed our ideas about the "primitive" or that before him there had been no concern with universals or abstract ideas in anthropology.

Beyond that, Lévi-Strauss' binary formulations (like "the raw and the cooked") were a simplistic cookie-cutter device borrowed from the dated linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the granddaddy of now mercifully moribund post-structuralism, which destroyed American humanities departments in the 1980s. Lévi-Strauss' work was as much a fanciful, showy mishmash as that of Joseph Campbell, who at least had the erudite and intuitive Carl Jung behind him. When as a Yale graduate student I ransacked that great temple, Sterling Library, in search of paradigms for reintegrating literary criticism with history, I found literally nothing in Lévi-Strauss that I felt had scholarly solidity.

In contrast, the 12 volumes of Sir James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" (1890-1915), interweaving European antiquity with tribal societies, was a model of intriguing specificity wed to speculative imagination. Though many details in Frazer have been contradicted or superseded, the work of his Cambridge school of classical anthropology (another of whose ornaments was the great Jane Harrison) will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today's sterile academic climate.

What mal-education goes on at killer prices at the elite schools! Skyrocketing tuition costs are legalized piracy. It's a national scandal, which the mainstream media has shamefully neglected. A few weeks ago, I was bemused to discover the bill from my first semester (fall 1964) at Harpur College of the State University of New York at Binghamton. The tuition was $200, which was offset by my state scholarship for that amount. My shared room was $150; linen was $6.50. Board at the cafeteria was $225. The physical education fee was $2, and there was an activity fee of $17.50 and a general college fee of $12.50. The grand total my parents owed for the semester was $413.50 -- for which I received the superb education that is still the basis of my professional life as a teacher and writer. If only the billions upon billions that this country has thrown down the drain in Iraq and Afghanistan had been redirected to education and healthcare!

Now on, with relief, to pop! I've been enjoying "Gainsbourg Forever," a two-disc set made in France of the best songs of Serge Gainsbourg (1928-91). It came as a surprise that he wrote big-beat techno songs at the end of his career. I adore "Mon Légionnaire" (1989), which ends the collection and which I've been playing over and over in my car. This video doesn't quite capture the delicious crispness of the synthesizer and twangy guitar licks, but you get the idea. I nearly drove off the road when I heard "Bonnie and Clyde," Gainsbourg's 1968 duet with Brigitte Bardot, a homage to the epochal Arthur Penn film starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty of the prior year. In the video, Bardot (as amusingly deadpan as Nico fronting the Velvet Underground) shows a lot of leg and can be heard oddly whooping in the background. Check out Gainsbourg's mug in this vid, and don't tell me that he, Bob Dylan and Canada's Leonard Cohen weren't close cousins a few generations back in the old country (Eastern Europe and Russia). There's some shared genius DNA going on there.

A quick segue from grizzled, decadent experience to lyrical, springtime innocence: Here's Emily and Fiona, two young English sisters living in Germany who do amazingly deft versions of classic 1960s songs (presumably based on their parents' collection). When I recently stumbled on Emily and Fiona gravely performing "House of the Rising Sun," I literally got goose bumps. I felt that I was seeing apparitions from the 17th century -- the small-town singers of British and Scots-Irish folk ballads that would bewitch the Romantic poets and eventually produce American country music, centered in Appalachia. Emily and Fiona do a creditable job with the Mamas and Papas' "California Dreamin," as well as their less well-known "Creeque Alley," an autobiographical summary of the group's knockabout early years. (Creeque Alley is a tiny old town street in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I was ecstatic when I discovered it by accident six years ago.) Cheers to Emily and Fiona for their harmonizing gifts and musical mission!

Bouncing back to hard-bitten experience: This week, the U.K.'s Daily Mail published several photos of Lady Gaga on a German TV show. Now, come on, people, do you really believe that Lady Gaga is 23 years old? I've been in advanced doubt about it for a while, particularly after seeing this video of early photos of her hanging with some mighty tough critters. (A friend of mine said of Gaga in this vid: "Too many miles of bad road there.") I think Gaga was a hell of a lot sexier as a fun Italian-American brunette. This artificial, masklike, over-the-top Club Kids thing that she's now into seems compulsive and wearily passé. Give it a rest, and focus on the music!

And now Madonna is trying to resuscitate herself, body and mind, by taking transfusions from Brazil! The poverty-ridden favelas of Rio de Janeiro are her latest charity -- presumably because dusty, distant Malawi is too bare of the hordes of paparazzi required to record the latest feats of Our Lady Bountiful. How convenient that the best hotels of Ipanema are only minutes away from the Rio slums! Oh, that girl -- always thinking, ain't she?

Is it true, according to press rumors, that Madonna is vacationing with her boy toy Jesus Luz in a house in Bahia in the far northeast of Brazil? And that she is contemplating buying a house there? Is she planning to take tutorials from the queen of axe, Salvador da Bahia's very own superstar, Daniela Mercury? Well, it's kind of what I had in mind in my epic Salon column last year negatively comparing Madonna to Daniela. As a teacher, I will certainly take credit for this leap forward, if it occurs, in Madonna's much-delayed self-education.

Daniela herself has had a hectic few months, touring Brazil, Portugal and Argentina for her new album, "Canibalia." Last week she was the finale of the Latin Grammys in Las Vegas, which were broadcast by Univision and pulled the largest TV audience in the history of that event. Here are some sexy visuals: Daniela in a fabulous, textured, bronze suit with see-through netting before an industry dinner; in her black lace and black leather gauntlets stage costume in the press room; and (in a truncated video) energetically performing with her red-clad troupe of Bahian dancers onstage. Vive Brazil!

NOTE: Two weeks ago, my essay collection "Vamps & Tramps: New Essays"  was released in translation in France by Denoël Editions. The new subtitle (drawn from my manifesto, "No Law in the Arena") is "A Pagan Theory of Sexuality."

Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

You have been hitting that note about the need to shake up his staff for quite a while. Yet isn't it true that people tend to surround themselves with like minds? You said recently that "I am hopeful that he will rid himself soon of these simplistic anti-American clichés." Has it occurred to you that maybe that is just who he is and the people he surrounds himself with are just a reflection of himself?

I see Obama and his presidency as the crowning of the ideas of that northeastern liberal aristocracy you so much criticize. He appears to me as a cliché of all their pathologies, and yet you seem infatuated with him. You continually praise his speech and demeanor while to me it seems like a mask for his lack of substance. I find him to be a man of an oversized ego, with a messianic complex and a cult-like following, which would not be so scary if he didn't wear the media as his own personal lap dog.

As a person born and raised in Latin America who studies history as a hobby, I can't help but see President Obama as the closest thing we have had in this country to the long line of populist leaders who have been the scourge of Latin America for decades and sent many of us here into exile. He is not a Chavez-like figure who uses vulgarity and threats as a weapon but a more sophisticated version of a young Peron.

Hermes Diaz

Miami

Yes, ever since week one of the Obama administration, I have been doggedly calling for heads to roll. As months of crass ineptitude drag on, however, the blacklist of those who should be tagged for the guillotine gets longer and longer. The most recent fiasco, of course, was sending the president of the United States on a humiliating fool's errand to beg for the Olympics as a Chicago boondoggle. I cheered when splendiferous Rio de Janeiro rightfully got the gig.

You are correct to argue that the cluster of appointees around a person in power reflects his or her belief system and modus operandi. However, it is a mark of leadership to recognize the need for professional evolution beyond an old comfort zone. Obama is approaching a turning point which will define his political future, if he has one. He is surrounded by some mighty small potatoes who need shoveling into the dumpster. The petty provincials need to go, and far more sophisticated and world-savvy analysts must urgently be brought on board.

Opponents of Obama are perplexed by the disconnect in polling between Americans' rejection of Obama's policies and his personal popularity. Count me among those who are very critical of many of Obama's actions or evasions but who continue to like him and to believe in his potential as a world leader. It's true he has accomplished nothing thus far and did not remotely deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, a gift carrying a terrible curse. The Nobel should have been the crown of Obama's career and not the butt of jokes. Yet the award has tangible significance insofar as Obama has endorsed the humanistic (if unrealistic) dream of a world without nuclear weapons. The lion may never lie down with the lamb, but politics will always be mired in seething, selfish squalor unless idealistic leaders appeal to our higher nature.

Hey, I'm a soldier and have been one for 30 years. My son is a soldier too. I have been deployed to the Iraqi theater, and my son is deployed to the Afghani theater. These are my credentials.

I understand your opposition to Iraq and Afghanistan in an intellectual sense, but I probably am tribal, too, and can't understand it in an emotional sense. Here is my take from one who has been there and has someone I love still there. I agree the stated reasons we went to Iraq were in error, but the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan have one redeeming feature. The people we are fighting are tribal. All the nuts and haters are flocking to Iraq and Afghanistan to throw us out and kill us. That is excellent, and here is why.

If you look at the terrorist attacks against American target statistics for the 10 years before the Iraq "incursion" and then look at the statistics since, you will find a significant drop. I believe this is because all the crazies are attacking us in Iraq and Afghan, along with the disruptions we are causing their planning cells. While I personally dislike being shot at and targeted for high explosives (from personal experience), I much prefer that to people targeting my family at home. Here's why. In the field I have weapons and support. When the other guy comes along, he is neither trained, equipped nor supported as well as I. In the majority of cases, he dies, not me. Look at the comparative death rates in the attacks in those prior ten years and now. We are killing more of them now than they are of us. In the field, we are prepared; in a terrorist attack, we are not.

Anything that reduces that is good, in my opinion.

By the way, I personally think fighting and killing are a waste of energy and treasure, but I am not going to stand aside while some other idiot who doesn't believe as I do goes around killing my people.

Take care--

Bill Gasaway

Forest Park, GA

Thank you very much for your family's selfless service to our nation. U.S. forces, with international cooperation, have concretely succeeded in major disruption of jihadist communications and training camps. But I remain skeptical of the "flypaper" theory of terrorism, which alleges that bad guys around the world have flocked to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight the U.S. incursions. Exactly what evidence is there of such a migration of outsiders? This viewpoint underestimates the degree of active indigenous resistance to the American presence, including among citizens who might not otherwise be politically engaged or attracted to Muslim extremism.

Because of my own family's service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York National Guard), I am a strong supporter of the military and do believe that there are just wars. However, I want the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I oppose the costly maintenance of U.S. military bases all over the world. Let Europe, for example, pay the price of its own defense and stop leeching off of us. Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends. With advanced satellite technology that can read the street number on a house, why are we still locked to outmoded theories of warfare predicated on the cumbersome transport of battalions and materiel?

American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation. In many long-embattled regions, there are internal processes at work that simply must play themselves out. We are overextended abroad and committing financial suicide at home. The escalating national debt is our enemy within. Fanatical jihadism will continue to be a tactical problem, but its attacks, however devastating, will always be sporadic and local. Jihadism cannot destroy the U.S. But our own reckless politicians, spending us into oblivion and servitude to China, can.

I was a liberal graduate student in the 1980s. I am now a conservative Navy veteran, small-business owner, wife of an active duty officer who has been to Iraq four times (and will deploy again next year) and a concerned mother of two small children.

As a registered Independent, I am very concerned about where our country is headed. I am now a "right-wing terrorist" and have attended multiple Tea Parties. I host an active political Facebook page ("Pensacola Teaparty"). This is the first time in my 44 years that I have been involved in politics.

On both the domestic and foreign policy fronts, I am scared to death about where our country is going. My husband is the first to raise his hand to volunteer for a mission when duty calls (he's a Navy SEAL and physician), but I am increasingly concerned over the lack of strategy in our current war efforts.

I am sickened to see our Constitution being trampled on day after day. I am disgusted with the corruption and dirty politics being played on both sides of the aisle. I am infuriated that our elected officials arrogantly refuse to listen to We the People, no matter how many genuinely concerned citizens peacefully congregate at town halls or on the streets of Washington, D.C.

So much of the population is ill-served by the mainstream media's "coverage" of events. Like you, I listen to talk radio every single day (I am now a photographer and work from home). This isn't about liberal versus conservative. It's not about Democrat versus Republican. It's about right versus wrong. It's about liberty versus tyranny (thank you, Mark Levin!).

I and scores of other "Mommy Patriots" are genuinely frightened for the future of our children, and we are rallying to save our great nation. Our country needs people who are not afraid to speak the truth!

Cheryl Casey

Pensacola, FL

I have been deeply impressed by the citizen outrage that spilled out into town hall meetings this year. And I remain shocked at the priggish derision of the mainstream media (locked in their urban enclaves) toward those events. This was a moving spectacle of grassroots American democracy in action. Aggrieved voters have a perfect right to shout at their incompetent and irresponsible representatives. American citizens are under no duty whatever to sit in reverent silence to be fed propaganda and half-truths. It is bizarre that liberals who celebrate the unruly demonstrations of our youth would malign or impugn the motivation of today's protestors with opposing views.

The mainstream media's failure to honestly cover last month's mass demonstration in Washington, D.C. was a disgrace. The focus on anti-Obama placards (which were no worse than the rabid anti-LBJ, anti-Reagan or anti-Bush placards of leftist protests), combined with the grotesque attempt to equate criticism of Obama with racism, simply illustrated why the old guard TV networks and major urban daily newspapers are slowly dying. Only a simpleton would believe what they say.

Superb evisceration of the Democrats. I, too, have indelible memories of the risky, ecstatic mysticism of the late '60s (trivialized by younger baby boomers who turned hallucinogens into party drugs) and often wonder where that mystery depth dimension went.

But there is a sense in which that spirituality was only another affluence-subsidized consumer good, the Davy Crockett coonskin cap of our adolescence. And I'm afraid what our generation meant by "freedom" turned out to be little more than the freedom from responsibility and commitment and the freedom to get it on. Adolescent demands.

That's not fair, I realize. Breaking out of rigidified, oppressive notions about race, authority, women and nature was a true and very American liberation. Too bad those insights have now rigidified into new pieties that are as codified, unimaginative and oppressive as those they overthrew.

Annie Gottlieb

What you have described is the Orc-Urizen cycle, a pattern identified by the great Romantic poet and visionary artist William Blake after the French revolution. Blake saw every radical impulse toward freedom eventually ossifying and turning back on itself in a new oppression and tyranny. You are quite right to detect adolescent naiveté in many demands of white middle-class young people in the 1960s. We had been overprotected by our parents, who had suffered Depression and war for most of their lives and were determined to give us something better. Unfortunately, the result of this well-intended paternalism was a cultural banality and stifling conformism that the '60s tried to destroy by any means necessary. But it is still puzzling why that dissident generation so enamored of freedom would have drifted toward today's speech codes, thought control and ideological intolerance.

The purpose of this message is to express my outrage at the frequent criticism of Sarah Palin for having gone to five schools before she graduated from the University of Idaho. What many of her critics fail to understand, or smugly disdain, is the reason she attended several schools. Sarah's parents told their four children that they could not afford to pay their way through college, and if any of them wanted to go on to college, they must figure a way to pay for it on their own.

It is a towering credit to Sarah Palin's ambition, courage and will to persevere that she acquired college credit hours when and where she had the opportunity and could pay for them and had the drive and guts to earn her B.A. Although a degree from the University of Idaho may not impress someone who attended an Ivy League school, having the title the University of Idaho on her sheepskin is certainly more elegant than, say, Southwest Wyoming State Teachers College.

Those whose parents paid their way through school evidently don't appreciate what extra effort it took Sarah to acquire her B.A. But I do, because hailing from Galena, Kansas, the only Kansas town mentioned in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," I know what it's like to grow up poor, at least poor in relative terms.

It's common for working-class youngsters who manage to go on to college to go to one school, as did I, for their first couple of years. In many cases, a kid will live at home while going to a nearby college. It irks me that smug, spoiled brats have the gall to criticize Sarah Palin for going to several colleges, because she didn't flunk out of those schools -- she was scratching and clawing to grab credit hours when she could.

Although I graduated from the University of Kansas very near, if not at the very bottom, of my class, I remain proud of the degree I earned, because it enabled me to wiggle my way out of the lower working-class. I busted my fanny to make it through school, working as a busboy at a tavern and as a waiter in a sorority house. But first I went to school at a small state college, Kansas State Teachers College at Pittsburg, near my hometown, before transferring to the University of Kansas to earn my B.A. from a school with a better reputation than KSTC's.

My father was the youngest of ten children born to a farm family and probably never had a penny which he hadn't earned by his hard labor. He chose to lease and operate a gas station in Galena, Kansas, until he'd earned enough to purchase the station from the oil company. Operating a gas station was his vocation for more than 40 years. In all those years, I knew him to take only one weekend vacation, when he and my mother drove to St. Louis to watch a Cardinals game.

Dave Livingston

Colorado Springs, CO

Thank you very much for your personal testimony. I too have been repulsed by the elitist insults flung at Sarah Palin in the massive, coordinated media effort to destroy her. Hence I have been thoroughly enjoying the way that Palin, despite all the dirt thrown at her by liberal journalists and bloggers, keeps bouncing back as if unscathed. No sooner did the gloating harpies of the Northeastern media think they had torn her to shreds than she exploded into number one on Amazon.com with a memoir that hadn't even been printed yet! With each one of these amusing triumphs, Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.

Yes, the snobbery about Palin's five colleges is especially distasteful, given the Democratic party's supposed allegiance to populism. Judging by the increasingly limited cultural and factual knowledge of graduates of elite schools whom one encounters working in the media, blue-chip sheepskins aren't worth the parchment they're printed on these days. Young people forced through the ruthlessly competitive college admissions rat race have the independence and creativity pinched right out of them. Proof? Where are the major young American artists, writers, critics or movie-makers of the past 20 years? The most adventurous and enterprising minds have gone into high tech. We're in a horrendous cultural vacuum because our status-besotted education industry is geared toward producing not original thinkers but docile creatures of the system.

Your opposition to hate crimes legislation makes some intuitive sense and is not uncommon. But my understanding is that it's contradictory to some of the foundational ideas of U.S. law.

Would you also erase the traditional distinctions between the various degrees of murder, and between murder and manslaughter? The exact parsing varies by state, but some sort of stratification of killings by heinousness seems to be nearly universal. A murder committed for financial gain is worse than a murder committed in the heat of passion, and either is worse than an unintended killing. In these broad instances, the exact details of the crime are likely to differ, but that is coincidental. It's easy enough to come up with thought experiments in which the only variation lies in motivation or mental state.

You are understandably reluctant to turn the analysis of a defendant's private thoughts over to government functionaries, but that doesn't mean that mental state can simply be disregarded. Somebody has to make a determination of motive. (Sadly, novelists and sibyls are rarely on hand to fill this role in court.) Would you really want sentences for murder to be assigned without reference to motive?

Hate crimes are not newly invented crimes. They're just garden-variety crimes for which racial or ethnic antipathy is acknowledged as a potential motivation and as an aggravating factor; that is, a factor that causes the crime to be considered more serious than it otherwise might be. Many other aggravating factors are defined in existing law: profit motive, planning or premeditation, targeting of specific groups (police officers, judges, public officials, mail carriers), commission of the crime in the context of the planning or execution of a second crime and so on.

The real question is: Are these motivations common enough and pernicious enough that they merit special mention? If you had written that judges and juries already have wide enough latitude to make use of their intuitive appraisal of a crime's seriousness, I wouldn't be arguing. But you seem to be stating rather explicitly that no consideration should be given to mental state in any legal context. Really?

Garth Snyder

Seattle, WA

Thank you for your very cogent and stimulating rebuttal. In rejecting the category of hate crimes, I never meant to imply that I also object to classifying degrees of murder. However, the latter gradations are exculpatory, making the blunt instrument of ancient law more nuanced and flexible. I would question the relevance of this issue to hate crimes, which in my view impose a rigid conceptual frame derived from social engineering onto the legal process.

You raise an excellent point about harsher penalties on the books for assaults on police officers. However, I have never understood the reasoning informing those statutes, which seem to endow the lives of police officers with more value than those of ordinary citizens. There is certainly a social benefit in protecting police officers, who put their lives on the line every time they make a random traffic stop. Yet I see no parallelism here with the lives of gays in the U.S. Exactly what sacrifices have gays qua gays made for the nation to deserve protected status? Harassment of or violence against citizens for any reason should not be tolerated, whatever the motive.

There are a thousand elusive complications to any clash in public spaces like schools, bars or the street. For example, there was a horrifying recent incident in Philadelphia, where a melee in a bar among drunken white guys ended up with the beating and kicking to death of one of them outside the Phillies' baseball stadium. Nothing but stupidity and deranged egotism was at fault in this atrocity. But if any one of the participants happened to have been gay or black, the p.c. vultures would have swooped in and turned the entire thing into a breast-beating cause célèbre -- even if homophobia or racism played no role whatever in the events.

Hate crimes legislation, in my view, simply cushions people in their own subgroups and gives them a damaging sense of false entitlement. The world will always be a very dangerous place where anyone can cross paths with a psychopath. The human mind is home territory for Edgar Allan Poe's "imp of the perverse." Here's another example from the Philadelphia police blotter: Last year, five African-American youths, just for the fun of it, sucker-punched a passing white man in the Center City subway concourse in the middle of the day. A manager at Starbuck's who was on his way to work, he died from an asthmatic attack triggered by the assault. Surely he had been targeted because of his race. Why, then, was it not denounced as a hate crime? Why did those amoral marauders get a free pass in the hate crimes sweepstakes? The historical injustices suffered by enslaved Africans should not give infinite latitude to depraved individuals.

I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care.

I'd appreciate hearing your views on the various reactions to Roman Polanski's fate. What seems lacking is open acknowledgment that a country's great artists do -- and, in rare cases, should -- receive special treatment. As in the case of Jean Genet, whom the French government released from prison simply for being a genius, Polanski should, for the greater good, be allowed to continue his work.

Is this moral relativism? I don't think so. The primary goal of a country's laws should be to protect and foster its citizens. In this case, Polanski is no danger to anyone, and the victim simply wants to move on. Prosecutors must decide which cases are in the public's best interest to pursue (no mention yet of the money and resources that could have been better spent here), so appeals to justice ring false. And besides, if given the choice between a great new Polanski movie and another media circus, which would you rather watch?

Tim Sandel

When I first heard that Roman Polanski had been arrested in Switzerland, I thought it was absurd because of his advanced age as well as the gravity of other issues facing this war-torn world. It seemed like a publicity stunt by Los Angeles authorities with too much time on their hands. However, on reflection, I soon concluded that Polanski, whatever his artistic achievements, has no right to claim exemption from the law's demands. He is not a political refugee but a proud sybarite who has flaunted his tastes and conquests. If you live like the Marquis de Sade (one of the principal influences on my first book, "Sexual Personae"), then you should be willing to be imprisoned like Sade.

Polanski's low-budget, bleakly black and white "Knife in the Water" (1962) was the first foreign film I saw in my very first week of college in 1964. It made a stunning impact on me and completed my liberation from the perky tyrannies of the ubiquitous Doris Day, who ruled mainstream U.S. culture like a basilisk. "Repulsion" (1965), another low-budget tour de force, retains its power as a surrealist nightmare starring the delectable Catherine Deneuve as a psychotic manicurist marooned in London. The occult "Rosemary's Baby" (1968) is superb story-telling with a sardonic twist; Polanski got sensational performances out of both Ruth Gordon and Mia Farrow. I have constantly recommended "Chinatown" (1974) to my students as a brilliant example of a moody, issues-oriented film noir in color -- with three more top-notch performances (Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston). I have little interest in Polanski's later films.

Despite this distinguished body of work, however, could anyone seriously argue that Polanski's contributions to U.S. culture are so weighty that he deserves suspension of our laws for drugging and seducing a 13-year-old girl -- even if it occurred during the hedonistic 1970s? Jean Genet, in contrast, was pardoned by France because of his cultural achievements in radically extending and subverting French language and literature (following Gide and Proust). Polanski's work will retain the esteem of film historians and stay in rotation on Turner Classic Movies, but that's a sliver of the population. Most Americans reading news stories about the Polanski case didn't know who the hell he is. Why should they?

Subject: Mind-numbing French professor

I am perhaps the only airplane mechanic who also has a B.A. degree in French literature. I'm interested in obtaining a master's degree in French and have searched websites of my local universities for more information about various programs. I came across this professor's home page at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Rice has a great reputation, and but what kind of nonsense is this? Here are his areas of interest:

How do we articulate what we have learned in recent decades from a "cultural constructionism" of subjectivity and literary canons with aesthetic ecstasy (both the "old" and the "new" aestheticism)? Deleuze's and Derrida's notions of a "dissolved cogito" and "non-egological" consciousness in the context of aesthetic ecstasy. More generally, in what might life "after the subject" consist? A reevaluation of both the continuities and apparent standoff between phenomenology -- Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Michel Henry -- and poststructuralism. I.e., possible revisionary versions of the dominant account of French thought from existentialism to the present. For example, were the French poststructuralists really ever the "constructionists" (still less the "cultural" constructionists) they have been claimed to be? Distinguishing between constructionism's lasting contributions and its simultaneous unwitting complicity with the domination of all life-forms by global capitalism.

I have no idea what he is talking about. What does this say about modern scholarship? Or am I just a dumb blue collar guy?

Wondering in Houston, John

Oh my lord, what a fly-flecked pile of horse manure! It's hard to believe that such empty palaver is still being peddled by major universities in the U.S. And this guy has a Yale PhD! (When I got mine, it still meant one could write coherent English.) One can only pity the parents bankrupting themselves for their children to be "educated" by such chicanery.

My manifesto against post-structuralism (which squirted its toxins into the tiny open jaws of the American professoriate) was "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf," published in the spring 1991 issue of Arion and reprinted (78 pages long) in my first essay collection, "Sex, Art, and American Culture." It caused an uproar at the time, but most sensible people, on campus and off, have slowly swung around to my way of thinking. But airless pockets of pollution clearly still remain.

I read "Sexual Personae" several years ago, right at the beginning of my career as a male soprano. I found it a fascinating and helpful companion to the odd, quasi-castrated role in which I found myself -- in the eyes of the public and music administrators, at least -- if not in the way I viewed myself.

A male soprano, incidentally, is not to be confused with a countertenor -- you might as well conflate baritones and tenors into the same voice category. We sing the roles of heroes and lovers, tyrants and freaks -- and occasionally over-the-top women. However, the feminist movement that is now making itself felt in opera is replacing theatrical verisimilitude with the arguably easier-on-the-ears voices of women.

Here is a brief intro to male soprano singing (running about four minutes). My primary goal is to interest you in this subset of artistic gender-bending. The piece I am performing is by Giacomo Carissimi, from the Roman Church around 1650. The popes had forbidden both opera and female singers in the Papal States, and that verbot gave rise to this form of operatic church music, sung almost exclusively by soprano castrati.

I may not need to say this, but I am not a castrato, merely a man who can, for some reason or other, still sing soprano.

Robert Crowe

Berlin, Germany

Thank you so much for sending this link, which I am sure will be of the highest interest to culturally oriented Salon readers. Your singing is absolutely gorgeous! Why is there no profusion of videos of your performances in Europe and the U.S. on YouTube.com? I am hopeful that this surprising gap will soon be remedied.

In "Sexual Personae," I wrote about Balzac's strange story "Sarrasine," where a French sculptor visiting Rome falls in love with a beautiful prima donna who turns out to be a castrato under the vengeful protection of a gay cardinal. (For those interested in this subject, I recommend Angus Heriot's excellent 1956 study, "The Castrati in Opera.") "Sarrasine" should obviously be made into a movie as should Théophile Gautier's piquant transvestite adventure, "Mademoiselle de Maupin" (1835), which Greta Garbo wanted to star in but never did.

Turner Classic Movies recently showed a fantastic day-long series of Jean Seberg films. While probably known best for "Breathless" (1960), the TCM presentation showed, I think, that her true mastery is in "In the French Style" (1963) and "Lilith" (1964). I love the sophistication and silken glamour of "In the French Style," but it's "Lilith" that really wowed me.

I'm absolutely blown away by Seberg's portrayal of Lilith Arthur, a sort of schizophrenic femme fatale, whose effortless, amoral manipulations bring death to at least one man and madness to another. The film suffers from too many long, boring shots of Warren Beatty's dimensionless mug (he's had the same expression on his face for 40 years!), but every moment Seberg is on screen is rich, evocative and disturbing. Seberg obviously knew she was playing not only a complicated woman of the 1960s but also a figure from mythology, dating back over 5,000 years. She rose magnificently to the occasion. I doubt that Sharon Stone studied Seberg's Lilith for her role in "Basic Instinct," but the characters seem made from the same stuff. And one wonders if Jessica Walter, who was also in "Lilith," picked up a thing or two from Seberg on the set, because just a few years later, she'd explore similar territory as a deranged femme fatale in "Play Misty For Me" (1971.) I would suggest that Seberg as Lilith is one of the truly great, overlooked performances by a woman in film history.

Damion Matthews

San Francisco

My favorite Jean Seberg film is "Bonjour Tristesse," where she plays Francoise Sagan's dissolute ingenue cavorting around the Riviera. Here is a riveting, subtitled 1960 interview with a bitchy French journalist where Seberg is charmingly gracious and shows off her natural poise and charisma. I adore the way that, while speaking French with quick facility here, she aggressively maintains her flat Iowa accent! Seberg's romantic travails and psychological decline were tragic: At the age of 41, she was found dead in her car in Paris, a presumed suicide due to the overdose levels of barbiturates found in her blood.

You draw some very intriguing parallels between "Lilith," "Basic Instinct" (for which I did the DVD commentary) and "Play Misty for Me," one of my all-time favorite films and the blatant inspiration for "Fatal Attraction." Jessica Walter tears up the scenery in "Play Misty," as she also did in the film version of Mary McCarthy's "The Group." It's a scandal that Walter was underutilized in Hollywood, although she has made her presence felt in TV. In the glory days of the old studio system, roles for her would have been specially written into scripts. With her statuesque height and power of personality, she belongs to the swashbuckling line of Mary Astor and Alexis Smith.

Subject: All I ever needed to know I learned from Dynasty

While I browsed the shelves at the public library the other day, a pink-jacketed book caught my eye -- "The Art of Living Well" by Joan Collins. I checked it out without haste. I have been fascinated by Ms. Collins' charisma since her days as Alexis Morell Carrington Colby Dexter Rowan on the nighttime soap "Dynasty," which aired on ABC from 1981 to 1989. The book gives tips on exercise, diet, etiquette, etc., but the most interesting chapter is titled "Glamour and How to Achieve It." It basically lists all of the tricks of the old Hollywood stars and gives some insight into why "Dynasty" was so engrossing and why Joan Collins' character Alexis was the linchpin of the series.

I watched "Dynasty" religiously as a child, never missing a week. I have been rediscovering the series through Netflix rentals and marathon viewings. As an adult, the old Hollywood references that escaped me as a child are blatantly apparent -- a revelation that now explains why my father was a weekly viewer along with my mother and myself.

"Dynasty" was sort of the last bastion of the old studio system before most of the people who actually lived that life passed on. Its two female leads, Joan Collins and her nemesis, the goody-two-shoes second wife Krystal Carrington, played by Linda Evans, were seen off screen looking very much like their television characters, dressing in the same wardrobe created by the show's costume designer, Nolan Miller. No expense was spared for the costumes on "Dynasty" -- the finest furs and fabrics were used, similar to the way the studio stars were costumed by the studios for all public appearances. Each character had several costume changes per episode. It is worth watching for the clothes and sets alone. These people are supposed to be rich and look it, so the real thing was used whenever needed, from Rolls Royces to Gucci luggage.

Watching those old episodes, one longs for the days when no expense was spared to bring quality television to the masses. Now we are stuck with humdrum reality shows that never give one a sense of fantasy or a dream but just give you constant bickering and childish name calling. People will argue that there are quality shows on HBO or Showtime, but these are pay services -- they do not reach the masses of anyone just flicking on his or her TV set, and they still don't hold a candle to "Dynasty." I encourage everyone to take a second look at the series. Unfortunately, it is only available on DVD up to season four right now, but that should be enough to get you started. Wikipedia also has a great outline of the show and its characters. I would love to know your thoughts on the show and if you were ever a fan.

Thomas Paul

New York City

Am I a "Dynasty" fan? Be still, my beating heart! I have never recovered from the cancellation of "Dynasty." In fact, daytime soap opera never recovered from "Dynasty," period. The failure of daytime to realize that its primetime imitator had ramped up the glamour and melodrama to classic Hollywood proportions is one reason for the slow decline and extinction of soaps over the past 15 years.

Joan Collins had a tremendous cultural impact in "Dynasty" which has never been fully acknowledged. She instantly ended the drab, puritanical dress-for-success look that women had donned to enter the professions in the 1970s. Collins as Alexis Carrington Colby showed how an ambitious, hard-driving businesswoman could combine beauty and brains. She dressed to kill -- and women followed suit, reclaiming their sexuality and female allure with flamboyant colors, fabrics, jewelry and high heels. Donna Mills in "Knots Landing" went one step further: As the cut-throat businesswoman Abby Ewing, she was no campy vamp in the glittery Euro-flash Collins style but a subtly purring American blonde whose wide, liquid eyes entranced and paralyzed her victims.

Let's hope that your letter will inspire readers to lobby ABC to release "Dynasty" to cable so that a new generation can see how ravishingly sensuous and sweepingly entertaining TV can be!

Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

Having said that, I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will heads start to roll? It's rumored that the White House counsel may be booted, following Michelle Obama's chief of staff, and I hope it's a harbinger of things to come. Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.

Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton's megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.

But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical, because Democrats control the White House and both Houses of Congress. It isn't conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it's the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan -- it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

With the Republican party leaderless and in backbiting disarray following its destruction by the ideologically incoherent George W. Bush, Democrats are apparently eager to join the hara-kiri brigade. What looked like smooth coasting to the 2010 election has now become a nail-biter. Both major parties have become a rats' nest of hypocrisy and incompetence. That, combined with our stratospheric, near-criminal indebtedness to China (which could destroy the dollar overnight), should raise signal flags. Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

What does either party stand for these days? Republican politicians, with their endless scandals, are hardly exemplars of traditional moral values. Nor have they generated new ideas for healthcare, except for medical savings accounts, which would be pathetically inadequate in a major crisis for anyone earning at or below a median income.

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a "death panel" under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin's shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate's unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

Surely, the basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm. The present proposals are full of noble aims, but the biggest danger always comes from unforeseen and unintended consequences. Example: the American incursion into Iraq, which destabilized the region by neutralizing Iran's rival and thus enormously enhancing Iran's power and nuclear ambitions.

What was needed for reform was an in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Instead what we've gotten is a series of facile, vulgar innuendos about how doctors conduct their practice, as if their primary motive is money. Quite frankly, the president gives little sense of direct knowledge of medical protocols; it's as if his views are a tissue of hearsay and scattershot worst-case scenarios.

Of course, it didn't help matters that, just when he needed maximum momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass., police had acted "stupidly" in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama's automatic identification with the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable damage to the president's standing. The strained, prissy beer summit in the White House garden afterward didn't help. Is that the Obama notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown.

Both Gates and Obama mistakenly assumed that the original incident at Gates' house was about race, when it was about class. It was the wealthy, lordly Gates who committed the first offense by instantly and evidently hysterically defaming the character of the officer who arrived at his door to investigate the report of a break-in. There was no excuse for Gates' loud and cheap charges of racism, which he should have immediately apologized for the next day, instead of threatening lawsuits and self-aggrandizing television exposés. On the other hand, given that Cambridge is virtually a company town, perhaps police headquarters should have dispatched a moderator to the tumultuous scene before a small, disabled Harvard professor was clapped in handcuffs and marched off to jail. But why should an Ivy League panjandrum be treated any differently from the rest of us hoi polloi?

Class rarely receives honest attention in the American media, as demonstrated by the reporting on a June incident at a swimming pool in the Philadelphia suburbs. When the director of the Valley Swim Club in Montgomery County cancelled its agreement with several urban day camps to use its private pool, the controversy was portrayed entirely in racial terms. There were uninvestigated allegations of remarks about "black kids" made by white mothers who ordered their children out of the pool, and the racial theme was intensified by the director's inept description of the "complexion" of the pool having been changed -- which may simply have been a whopper of a Freudian slip.

Having followed the coverage in the Philadelphia media, I have lingering questions about how much of that incident was race and how much was social class. Urban working-class and suburban middle-class children often have quite different styles of play -- as I know from present observation as well as from my Syracuse youth, when I regularly biked to the public pool in Thornden Park. Kids of all races from downtown Syracuse neighborhoods were much rougher and tougher, and for self-preservation you had to stay out of their way! Otherwise, you'd get knocked to the concrete or dunked when they heedlessly jumped off the diving board onto our heads in the crowded pool.

In general, middle-class children today are more closely supervised at pools because the family can afford to have a non-working parent at home -- a luxury that working-class kids rarely have. What happened at the Valley Swim Club, whose safety infrastructure was evidently also overwhelmed by too many visiting kids who were non-swimmers, may have been a clash of classes rather than races. Were the mothers who pulled their kids out of the pool that day really reacting to skin color or what they, accurately or not, perceived to be an overcrowded, dangerous disorder? The incontrovertible offense in all this, which went unmentioned in the national media, was the closure for budgetary reasons by the city of Philadelphia this summer of 27 of its 73 public pools. There is no excuse for that kind of draconian curtailment of basic recreational facilities for working-class families, sweltering in the urban summer heat.

Now on to art and pop. Highlight of the month for me was definitely a recent performance by Alo Brasil, a local Brazilian music and dance ensemble, at Philadelphia's World Cafe Live. I positioned myself smack in front of the stage to bathe in the magnificent, hypnotic drumming, a Bahian style with West African roots that takes one into another reality -- sublime and trans-historical. Of course, then there was the sensory overload of the beautiful, nimble, long-legged samba dancers in their jeweled bikinis and high heels! But all the dancers of Alo Brasil, male and female, are absolutely brilliant -- it was mind-blowing. Anyone born and raised in Bahia (such as Daniela Mercury) has obviously been immersed in these rhythms from earliest childhood. They are surely profoundly transformative, reshaping the neural synapses and opening the mind toward ecstatic group communication. To be continued!

Our pop medley for this column begins with the Algeria-born Etienne Daho, whose three-disc set, "Dans la Peau de Daho" (2002), I have been working my way through. Last year, I posted two other videos featuring Daho -- his quietly compelling duet with Charlotte Gainsbourg and his moving tribute to Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. This song, "Paris le Flore," is a hauntingly atmospheric ode to random encounters in the streets and cafés of Paris. In the narrative superimposed by the video, two notable French performers do their thing -- Virginie Ledoyen (who appeared with Catherine Deneuve in "8 Women" and with Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Beach") and singer/actor Benjamin Biolay, ex-husband of Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni. I love the way Daho's shimmery song re-creates the meditative mystique of French eroticism, shown in a thousand films. And that liquid, stuttering bass line -- divine! (Hey, Salon readers, if you don't have good speakers on your computer, you're missing the cultural riches of the Web.)

Next on the docket is Sharon Stone, exploding in all her topless glory on the cover of Paris Match. Now there's a gal who knows how to work the gym while still keeping the sacred flame of sexiness alive! Yes, you know who the Big Bad Example is of obsessive gym culture gone to seed -- that increasingly artificial construction of paraffin and chicken wire, our Madonna of the Shallows. Jesus Luz must be blessedly myopic. (Cue the Contours' 1965 R&B hit, "First I Look at the Purse.")

Caught HBO's 1998 movie "Gia" for the umpteenth time on cable the other day. My admiration remains boundless for the 22-year-old Angelina Jolie's bravura performance as the Philadelphia-born fashion model Gia Carangi, a heroin addict who died of AIDS in 1986. I've often recommended Stephen Fried's excellent 1993 biography, "Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia," but this time I hit the Web to see what else I could dig up.

Mother lode! I found Gia's original nude fence photos, shown in the movie being shot by the perverse fashionista Chris von Wangenheim. I was startled to learn that Wangenheim was killed in a car accident in 1981, another blow for Gia. In trying to find his obit, I discovered that New York Times files of the World War One era are filled with references to his noble German ancestors, many of whom were barons killed in battle. Another German decadent artiste, like the incomparable Helmut Newton.

Here are some wonderful photos of Wilhelmina (stylishly played in the movie by Faye Dunaway), the Dutch fashion model veteran of 300 covers who founded an agency that hired the scrappy Gia but who then tragically died of cancer at age 40 in 1980, leaving Gia bereft. And here's Gia's ever-patient, real-life girlfriend, Sandy Linter, who turns out to be a more in-your-face urban type of the Deborah Harry school than she was portrayed in the movie.

Interested parties should check out this pastiche of clips, with a great song, which ingeniously conflate Gia with Patricia Charbonneau in that lesbo classic "Desert Hearts" (1985). This is a good chance to appreciate anew the charming eroticism of the car-in-the-rain first kiss between Charbonneau and Helen Shaver, which proves the point I made in my last column about the best lesbian scenes on film having ironically been performed by straight women. Finally, here is Gia herself -- a late clip showing her in surly, rambling butch mode, with druggy speech and tics, and then a dazzling collection of her peak high fashion images, which whiz by too fast but still reveal what an astonishing, almost supernormal presence she was.

Oh, one last note. Gay trivia: The 17-year-old hustler who in 1975 murdered the gay film director Pier Paolo Pasolini by repeatedly running him over with his own car on an Italian beach was named Giuseppe Pelosi. Hmm ... Hustling must run in the family.

Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

Unfortunately, it's pretty obvious that Palin still lacks that cadre of trusted pros who are the invisible elves behind every successful national politician -- the assistants who gather and vet material and who filter proposals and plan logistics. In a way, this is part of her virtues -- her complete freedom from routine micromanagement and business as usual. She does her own thing with seat-of-the-pants gusto. It's why she remains hugely popular with the Republican grass-roots base -- as I know from listening to talk radio. Callers coming fresh from her rallies are always heady with infectious enthusiasm.

Of course you'd never know that from reading hit jobs like Todd Purdum's sepulchral piece on Palin in the current Vanity Fair. Scurrying around Alaska with his notepad, Purdum still managed to find comically little to indict her with. Anyone with a gripe is given the floor; fans are shut out. This exercise in faux objectivity is exposed at key points such as Purdum's failure to identify the actual instigator of Palin's extravagant clothing bills (a crazed, credit-card-abusing stylist appointed by the McCain campaign) and his prissy characterization of Palin's performance at the vice-presidential debate as merely "adequate." Hey, wake up -- Palin cleaned Biden's clock! By the end, Biden was sighing and itching to split.

Whether Palin has a national future or not will depend on her willingness to hit the books at some point and absorb more information about international history and politics than she has needed to know in her role as governor. She also needs a shrewder, cooler take on the mainstream media, with its preening bullies, cackling witches, twisted cynics and pompous windbags. The Northeastern media establishment is in decline, and everyone knows it. Palin should not have gotten into a slanging match with David Letterman or anyone else who has been obsessively defaming her or her family. Let surrogates do that stuff.

The vicious double standard is pretty obvious. Only the tabloids, for example, ran the photos of a piss-drunk Chelsea Clinton, panties exposed, falling into her car outside London clubs a few years ago. If Chelsea had been the scion of Republican bigwigs, those tacky scenes would have been trumpeted from pillar to post in the U.S. as signals of parental failures or turmoil in clan Clinton. As a Democrat, I detest the partisan machinations that have become standard in Northeastern news management and that are detectable in editorial decisions at major metropolitan newspapers nationwide. It's why I, like a host of others, have shifted my news gathering to the Web.

As to your question "How have we come to this pass in America where the assassination of top government officials is fodder for snide jokes on national radio?" let me outline the path off the top of my head.

My first memory of such a case was watching Alec Baldwin in 1998 demand that Henry Hyde, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, be stoned to death. Baldwin went on to demand that after that execution, the killing extravaganza should continue to the chairman's house, where his wife and children would be killed as well, along with the families of other Republican politicians whom Baldwin did not agree with. Baldwin later claimed it was just a joke, but I remember watching this on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," and I can assure you there was nothing funny about it in tone or substance. Baldwin's rage was chilling, his assassination endorsement grotesque.

Second, Randi Rhodes on her Air America show in 2004 compared George W. Bush to Fredo Corleone and said he should be taken out fishing -- and imitated the sound of a gunshot. The third thing was the 2006 film "Death of a President," featuring the assassination of George W. Bush while he was still a sitting president. I understand the purpose of the film was to explore the fallout of a modern assassination in the new media environment, but that could have been accomplished with a fictitious current president -- as is done in countless films, TV shows and books. In an environment that treats assassination so casually, it was inevitable that it would become joke fodder.

Michael James Barton
Sugar Land, Texas

Thank you very much for this chilling survey. Assassination scenarios are outrageous no matter which party indulges in them. This kind of ethical obtuseness has to stop. Our zero tolerance should also extend to jokes threatening rape of public figures -- something that was amazingly directed at Sarah Palin from liberal quarters shortly after she arrived on the national scene last year. Dehumanization is a stealthy process that ultimately destroys everyone.

Glad to see you notice Obama's halo slipping.

I was surprised that in your discussion of Obama's Cairo speech you did not discuss the section on women's rights more, which had one of the most egregious moral equivalences ever:

The sixth issue that I want to address is women's rights. I know there is debate about this issue. I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality.

This gives the idea that "the debate" about the issue of women's rights is centered on a Western fault -- that of denying women the right to cover her hair, which is at best a minor news item. Why does it need to be mentioned at all? Because it soothes the Islamic listener and handily deflects from the real issue that Islam opposes the education of women.

Now let me be clear: issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam. In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, we have seen Muslim-majority countries elect a woman to lead. Meanwhile, the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life, and in countries around the world.

This basically says that all women's equality in America is not as good as in Islam because some Islamic women have held positions of power. This gives the impression that women's rights in the U.S. are still a "struggle," if not worse than those in Islamic countries. No mention of stoning for adultery, zero property rights, female genital mutilation (85 percent of Egyptian girls are cut) and many other abuses that are widespread in the Muslim world.

As you said, first-draft material.

Mark Devlin

Yes, the excerpts you cite are pretty sloppy -- unsubstantiated rhetoric that should have been caught by Obama's speechwriting team. At some point I trust there will be a general shakedown and reorganization of the Obama staff. But any new administration is just feeling its way. Despite some flubs and lapses, Obama seems to me to have eased into the post of president with dignity and authority. I am hopeful that he will rid himself soon of these simplistic anti-American clichés. 

In regard to Islam and women's education, there is great debate over an evident discrepancy between what the Quran advocates and how it has been interpreted by conservative Arab societies. It cannot be flatly said that Islam opposes women's education. There are distinct local and regional differences intricately tied to history. Nations like Algeria, Egypt and Lebanon, for example, are far more supportive of educational opportunities for women than the Sudan, Yemen or Saudi Arabia. Cosmopolitan cultures are always more tolerant than those still under the heavy sway of ancient tribalism.

Thank you for so succinctly expressing your views concerning Jesus, etc. I totally agree with everything you mentioned. But I do question how we can intellectualize something that is not language-bound. The universe is a human concept. Am I wrong? 

We can only look at the world through our language -- Lord only knows that trees and storms do not conceptualize in human constructs. The "force," so to speak, can only be thought of in human terms. 

Ann Sayner
Rockford, Ill.

Actually, I disagree that language is or should be our primary medium for understanding the world. This was, in fact, the central point in my crusade in the 1990s against post-structuralism, whose monotonous foundation was the tunnel-vision linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. What a dungeon post-structuralists locked themselves and their hapless students into.

There are different parts of the brain, which science is still charting and exploring. Words are very important in human development, but they can never adequately explain the awesome mysteries of the universe. Dante dramatized this when Virgil, the Roman poet who is his guide through hell and purgatory, cannot accompany him to paradise. Virgil stands for reason and language, but sacred vision requires a leap into another dimension.

As someone who has spent an entire career teaching at arts colleges, I can testify to the quite different conceptual models with which musicians, dancers and visual artists process the world. The senses have their own logic and primacy -- a point I have tried to dramatize in my own readings of poetry and art. Expanded perception is closer to how animals are instinctively attuned to their environment. Words can record our observations, but they are merely a tool, subordinate to nature's stubborn physicality.

I am conservative politically, yet I see the profound weaknesses in the movement. One thing from the liberal side of thinking that I struggle with is the concept of a "hate crime." If I am murdered, is that less heinous than a member of a protected class being murdered?

Matthew Shepard's case is often singled out as the reason we need hate crime legislation. The question is: What more would those who propose hate crime legislation like to be done to the perpetrators? They are serving consecutive life sentences. I believe they should be executed for their crime, but it seems that most liberals oppose the death penalty. So what would be different in his case if this legislation were enacted? 

Steve Larson
Conejo Valley, Calif.

I have been on the record since the 1990s as strongly opposing hate crimes legislation. I think it is a totalitarian intrusion into citizens' thought processes. Government functionaries should not be ceded the dangerous authority to make decisions about motivation. They aren't novelists, psychologists or sibyls! Furthermore, there should be no special privileged class of protected groups in a democracy. A crime is a crime -- period.

The barbaric acts that led to the death of Matthew Shepard in 1998 deserved a very severe penalty, which has been applied. Although I am a supporter of the death penalty in extreme cases, I think there were ambiguities here: The aimless hooligans who beat Shepard and tied him to a fence perhaps didn't necessarily mean to kill him. Despite my abhorrence of the crime, I was a dissenter about the sanctification of Shepard, a charming young man with a troubled family background who had faced many difficulties in life because of his frailty and lack of conventional masculinity.

Only a week before, Shepard had expressed fears about being killed. Given that apprehension, it is still inexplicable -- if the case is examined only through a political lens -- why Shepard would leave a public place in the company of such blatant thugs. A hate crimes law that claims to be able to penetrate the mind of the perpetrator should be equally open to questions about the victim. If, out of fairness or pity, one avenue of inquiry is shut down, then the other must be too.

The recent discovery of the Venus of Hohle Fels  reminded me of the Venus of Willendorf, which you introduced to me at the beginning of "Sexual Personae." Commentators see the newly found statue as porn and view it with a totally modern eye, a perfect example of how a lack of art history reduces one's comprehension of the world. Please set them straight!  

Tim Doyle

Right you are! I was absolutely incredulous at the vulgar media coverage of the Venus of Hohle Fels, which was tagged with the "pornography" label and joked about as an example of how sex-obsessed early man was. Furthermore, the statuette's enlarged genitals were interpreted as a misogynous distortion because they seem ugly to the modern eye.

What ignorance! These objects date from 35,000-18,000 B.C., the nomadic Stone Age, when human survival was under constant threat. Female fertility was a great mystery: Women seemed to be conduits of the primal powers of nature. The connection of sexual intercourse to pregnancy wasn't established yet -- because intercourse sometimes preceded puberty and also because it takes so long for any woman to "show." No one knew why one woman got pregnant and another didn't, or why a formerly fertile woman suddenly ceased to be so. But it certainly had little to do with men!

These statuettes were probably used in rituals to invoke the energy of mother earth. They belonged to a primitive religious universe where fear was the dominant emotion. The idea that they were porn props for randy cavemen is simply ridiculous!

I take some umbrage with your comments about Ginger Rogers. I must give notice that she is my favorite actress and I have had a crush on her for most of my life. A footnote to Fred Astaire? Maybe, but where is Laurel without Hardy, Ali without Frazier, Astaire without Rogers? Someone said he gave her class and she gave him sex appeal. A footnote to a great American icon maybe isn't all that bad.

Mac Carson
Dalton, Ga.

Oh, dear, I'm sorry if I dissed Ginger in my haste to defend Fred. My favorite Ginger Rogers performance is in "Stage Door," where she and Katharine Hepburn are like prickly lionesses sparring over territory. Some weird energy was happening between those two alpha gals! I meant that Ginger was a footnote in Hollywood history rather than to Fred himself. She was a classic, wisecracking American dame in that post-flapper period -- a new kind of woman like Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard, sexy and flirtatious, brash and irreverent. But Ginger was not a major, indelible artist like Astaire, who did pioneering work even in dance cinematography. She seems largely confined to her period, perhaps because her career was oddly truncated. Ginger physically changed into another persona, much more matronly -- as if she had absorbed or devoured that omnipresent, symbiotic mother of hers! 

It's a nitpick, but I don't think your phrase "co-written by Paul McCartney" is quite accurate with regard to the Daniela Mercury track you linked, "Essa Ternura." The lyrics have been translated in this version, but the song is all Sir Paul's; its original title is "A Certain Softness," and it was (one of the few tracks I didn't like that much) on his otherwise mostly very strong, fairly acclaimed 2005 album, "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard."  

Rich Forman
East Northport, N.Y.

No nitpick! The question of artist attribution is of utmost importance. Many, many apologies for my error. I misunderstood what Daniela said when I was discussing the song with her in New York (where she was finalizing the production of a song with Wyclef Jean for her new album, "Canibalia"). My Portuguese is deplorably rudimentary, but I hope to progress! Yes, you are right: Cesar Lemos simply did the translation of McCartney's lyrics -- making the gender of the beloved more ambiguous. Daniela slows the song down even further but paradoxically pushes it along with a more emphatic, swaying rhythm, producing an artfully Brazilian interlude of bewitchingly languid sensuality.

Depeche Mode's "Never Let Me Down Again": "Never want to come down, never want to put my feet back down on the ground"; "We're flying high, we're watching the world pass us by." Having never done drugs before, I still thought from Day One that this song was about drug use, but I'll have to take another look at it from your perspective. 

Michael Lis
Chicago

Many thanks to you and all the Salon readers who immediately wrote in to inform me about Dave Gahan's heroin addiction and suicide attempts. That crucial information does indeed change the meaning of his lyrics. But if I could salvage some of my original reading: The needle became a proxy penis and sadomasochistic lover, a homoerotic angel of both ecstasy and death. (Jean Cocteau's "Orphée," anyone?)

What startled me about this episode is how, yet again, I am always drawn to songs inspired by drugs -- even though I don't take drugs. (As the product of Mediterranean wine culture, I follow the well-worn path of Dionysian liquor -- and let's not forget Near Eastern beer.) Whether it was the electrified Bob Dylan (methedrine), early Pink Floyd (LSD), the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street" (heroin), or David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust (cocaine), I seem to love artists in their most altered, hallucinatory states. Yet another chapter for some future manifesto on psychedelic criticism.

I wanted to make you aware of one misapprehension I discovered in your column regarding a song from U2's most recent album. You interpreted the song to be a paean to mutual understanding and a "manifesto of artistic mission." This is an interesting take but one that unfortunately isn't borne out by the lyrics. The true meaning of the song is simpler but also more sublime -- more "magnificent," if you will.  

"The Magnificent" (as the subject of the song is referred to near the end) is in my view none other than God. As Bono sings, "I was born to be with you/ In this space and time": He acknowledges a relationship with his Creator, the one who made both time and space. "After that and ever after/ I haven't had a clue" refers to his ignorance of what the afterlife (the "ever after" outside of "this space and time") will be like. In the chorus, he refers to love having left a mark on him, and yet that same love having healed his hurts, his "scars." Famously, the book of John declares, "God IS love" [emphasis mine]. 

The second verse of the song is where the evidence that the subject of this powerful hymn is God is nearly undeniable. Bono points to the sovereignty of God as he declares that he was "born to sing for you/ I didn't have a choice but to lift you up/ And sing whatever song you wanted me to." However, he also recognizes his free will as a man, adding, "I give you back my voice." The last line in this verse is particularly clear in pointing to the Creator as the focus, saying, "From the womb my first cry, it was a joyful noise..." Throughout the book of Psalms, worshippers of God are encouraged to "Make a joyful noise" to the Lord. It is a unique expression, characteristically used in this book of the Bible (see Psalms 66:1, 81:1, 95:1, 98:4, et al.). Also, Jesus himself famously remarked in the book of Matthew, "Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise [to God]?" 

Lastly, Bono uses a phrase during the ending stanzas of the song that is unique to a Judeo-Christian worldview -- "Justified 'til we die." As Paul writes in his epistle to the Galatians, "Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified." As you likely know, for the Christian, trusting in Christ's sacrifice on the cross and his resurrection from the dead makes one righteous in the sight of God, as the believer is given (or, more theologically, imputed) the perfection of Christ, who became the sacrificial offering to God for the sins of mankind. 

About 10 years ago, I came to know personally the God whom I believe Bono is clearly singing to. That you were so affected by this song is meaningful to me, as it is my hope that you, too, will come to know the peace and joy that come from giving one's heart back to the One who created it in the first place. I will be praying for you today, and specifically "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." I believe that you have some suspicions that this may be true but may have as yet been unwilling to give your life to the magnificent One enshrined in this song that you responded to so strongly. He loves you, and made you, too, to be with Him. It will be my prayer that you make that decision today. May God richly bless you. 

Don Stockton
Lake Forest, Calif.

Thank you very much for your good wishes. And my thanks also to Joseph Hartman of Arlington, Va., who wrote in to argue as eloquently as you have that the U2 song is "a psalm to God."

However, I must respectfully disagree. "Magnificent" is definitely a magnificat, a hymnlike song of praise, and it is permeated with religious references -- much as love songs often were in African-American soul music. But as I interpret Bono's lyrics (from my classroom experience as a teacher of poetry), there are several key details suggesting that it is not God but the audience who is being addressed. "I didn't have a choice but to lift you up": Surely Bono is not telling God that He needs lifting! It's the audience who need intervention and exaltation. "You and I will magnify": Devout humans do the magnifying, not God, the subject of that magnification.

Yes, Bono is saying he was destined to sing -- like the Celtic bards before him. He was one of the chosen few even as a squalling infant. "I was born to be with you in this space and time": the "you" here is not God, who exists outside of space and time, but other mortals subject to limitation. The soul had to leave God to come to earth. In professing uncertainty about what is beyond the grave, Bono is rejecting Christian orthodoxy. The "Magnificent" to whom he sings might well be God, but it could also be the universe or life itself.

I have found the Holy Grail of lesbian dirty movies. I have read that you (like me) are more attracted to straight and bisexual women than to lesbians. My taste in porn dates back to the '70s and my dad's collection of Penthouse magazines that my brother and I would find under the bed. I have often wondered why there is no lesbian porn like that -- really erotic, beautiful women who look like they are into it.

"Girl on Girl" material for straight men is usually disappointing, with lots of giggling and glancing at the cameraman. I feel like I should watch so-called dyke porn, but starting with "On Our Backs" and now its heirs like "The Crash Pad," those lesbian-targeted products adhere to a different aesthetic than what I can relate to. Lots of piercing, tattoos, boi models, etc.

I just discovered a couple of studios that use hot women who genuinely love women, with an emphasis on psychological connection, drama, passion but with the focus on hardcore action. Check out "Sweetheart Video," anything by Viv Thomas, and also Girlfriends Films and a few others. A good Web site to check out is lezlove.com.  They cater to straight men, lesbians, couples -- a peaceable kingdom of pervs. This video is a YouTube appropriate PG-13 mash-up I made with clips featuring the gorgeous, passionate Samantha Ryan. She also does mainstream adult films that are unsexy and inane, but in these indie films she is an amazing artist and apparently a black belt in lesbian sex. I hope it cheers you up!

Lisa Moscatiello

What a fun way to end this month's column! Thanks a million for your spicy contribution. Let's hope other Salon readers will weigh in on the vexed question of lesbo porn, most of which I find hopelessly banal. Your beloved Samantha Ryan reminds me of the Swedish-French actress Marika Green, who played Bee, the swashbuckling blonde in a safari jacket who conquers Sylvia Kristel's heart in the first, best "Emmanuelle" movie (1974). Oh, those were the days of sophisticated eroticism!

The sad truth is that the hottest lesbo scenes ever committed to film were enacted by straight women -- Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in "The Hunger," Helen Shaver and Patricia Charbonneau in "Desert Hearts," Stephane Audran and Jacqueline Sassard in "Les Biches." Even in Showtime's "The L Word," which degenerated into psychopathological bathos, the straight Jennifer Beals was stratospherically hotter than the sole, sad-sack lesbian actress on that series. All this propaganda about the era of the lipstick lesbian! Under the surface, it seems to be the same old dreary soap opera, tarted up in fancy new rags.

After a lifetime of observation, I must regretfully conclude that men make everything hotter -- whether in gay or straight porn. I don't mean men have to be concretely present, only implied as the ultimate audience for primo sexual display. Let's turn from Nordic Samantha Ryan to two Brazilian peacocks on parade -- Daniela Mercury and another singer, Aline Rosa, in their now notorious kiss  on a TV show last year, clearly a homage to the Madonna-Britney Spears caper of 2005.

The entire erotic charge of this flamenco-like pas de deux comes from the confident heterosexuality of both women, who project a natural bisexual responsiveness that I think is terrific. If this is some new Brazilian synthesis, I'm all for it. Let the exports begin! By the way, the classic hit song that Daniela and Aline are singing, "A Night and a Half," was written by the famous Marina Lima, a lesbian with a bisexual history. It's a seduction fantasy, full of imagery of beaches and nakedness. But for me the half-clothed is always more piquant than the nude -- as in the swaggering Daniela's man-tailored vest. Elegant and dapper!

Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

Obama's speech (which I read rather than heard) seemed to my teacher's eye like a strong first draft rather than a polished final product. This could and should have been one of the most important documents in American political history. But any president, given the crushing onus of his daily agenda, needs help from a team of speechwriters and advisors who will flesh out his thoughts and argument with example and detail. Despite his Ivy League background, Obama evidently still lacks a reliable circle of erudite, cosmopolitan analysts like those John F. Kennedy drafted via his Harvard network.

The Cairo speech is well-organized, ticking off central thorny issues region by region. But there is an unsettling slackness and even sentimentality in its view of history. Yes, Obama's principal targeted audience was moderate Muslims, whom he attempted to woo away from extremism. But the president missed a huge opportunity to speak with equal force to doubters in his own nation, where suspicion of Muslims has sometimes turned ruthless and paranoid. For example, while driving recently on the New Jersey Turnpike, I was passed by an SUV with a U.S. Marine Corps sticker and a black-and-white decal that said: "What do you feel when you kill a terrorist? RECOIL." For "terrorist," of course, substitute "Muslim" -- a scenario where a person without a military uniform can nevertheless be instantly targeted for slaughter and where the executioner, wrenched far from his native land, has deadened himself to feel nothing but the kick of his own rifle.

Hence, given the lingering climate of fear and suspicion, I wish that the Cairo speech had been more specific and instructional about Muslim beliefs and culture. Obama's quick and late citations of Andalusia and Córdoba, for instance, could only prove baffling to the majority of Americans, who know virtually nothing about Moorish Spain. Obama's cursory two-sentence summary of the past relationship between Islam and the West -- jumping from "conflict and religious wars" to "colonialism" -- seemed vague and timid. While there was a mini-list of Muslim ideas and inventions (including the questionable assertion that we owe our "mastery of pens and printing" to the Arabs), no comparable credit was given to the enormous Western contributions to science, medicine and technology. But the gravest omission was that Obama failed to fully articulate the most basic Western concepts of legal process and civil liberties, which have inspired reformers around the world. The president of the U.S. should be an eloquent ambassador of those ideals wherever he goes.

It was also puzzling how a major statement about religion could seem so detached from religion. Obama projected himself as a floating spectator of other people's beliefs (as in his memory of hearing the call to prayer in Indonesia). Though he identified himself as a Christian, there was no sign that it goes very deep. Christianity seemed like a badge or school scarf, a testament of affiliation without spiritual convictions or constraints. This was one reason, perhaps, for the odd failure of the speech to acknowledge the common Middle Eastern roots of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, for both of whom the holy city of Jerusalem remains a hotly contested symbol.

Obama's lack of fervor may be one reason he rejects and perhaps cannot comprehend the religious passions that perennially erupt around the globe and that will never be waved away by mere words. By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like "scholarships," "internships," and "online learning" -- as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism.

The Cairo speech will certainly not be Obama's final word on this important subject, which I hope will remain on the front burner throughout his presidency. But before he can sway hearts and minds, the president will need to show that he understands the ultimate divergence and perhaps incompatibility of major creeds. At the finale, his recitation of soft-focus quotes from the Koran, Talmud and Bible came perilously close to a fuzzy New Age syncretism of "all religions are the same" -- which they unequivocally are not. The problem facing international security is that people who believe something will always be stronger and more committed than people who believe nothing -- which unfortunately describes the complacent passivity of most Western intellectuals these days.

Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo. All the backtracking and spin doctoring in the world will not erase that major blunder, which made the new president seem reckless, naive and out of control of his own party, which was in effect dictating to him from Capitol Hill. The GOP has failed thus far to gain traction only because it is trudging through a severe talent drought. But the moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate -- which is why Mitt Romney's political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.

Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, seems like a shoo-in. The hasty attempts by right-wing talk radio to dismiss her as a "mediocrity" comically misfired when it sank in that Sotomayor was a 1976 summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University -- at a time when Princeton had only recently gone coed and when its academic standards were still high. Her childhood experiences in a working-class immigrant neighborhood in New York certainly deepened her perspective and, as long as she demonstrates a record of professional objectivity, should properly be part of what she brings to the highest court.

But Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as "a wise Latina" trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment -- a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism when even the doughty Ann Richards was saying to the 1988 Democratic National Convention: "After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels." What flatulent canards mainstream feminism used to traffic in! Astaire, idolized even by Mikhail Baryshnikov, was one of the most brilliant and peerless dancers and choreographers of the 20th century. The agile but limited Ginger Rogers, a spunky, smart-mouthed comedian, is only a footnote. Get real, girls! This is the kind of mushy balderdash I doggedly had to plow through for five years in trying to find a good feminist poem for my collection, "Break, Blow, Burn." I never found one. Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!

OK, on to pop! It's been two decades since I bought my last U2 album. The peripatetic Bono's messianic do-gooder complex plumb wore me out. Then two weeks ago, "Magnificent," a song from U2's latest album, "No Line on the Horizon," came blasting out of my car radio. I was soon in Best Buy at record speed to snag the CD. Here's the video, which takes the strange but compelling conceit of white shrouds being gracefully blown by the wind off the Muslim world. It is a fascinatingly oblique plea for peace and mutual understanding. The lyrics (by Bono and ace guitarist the Edge) at first seemed like a standard love song. Then I suddenly realized they are a manifesto of artistic mission -- of musicians "born to be with you," the audience, and mandated by destiny to "magnify" the joy and beauty of life. Thrilling -- and yes, magnificent!

While I was in the store, I spotted another new release, this time a double disc -- Depeche Mode's "The Singles 1986-98." Where to start? So many of these songs are as fresh and high-impact as they were 20 years ago. "Personal Jesus," with its dark, evangelical power, remains an elegantly forbidding classic. Unfortunately, the official 1989 video is a tacky pastiche of a Mexi-Cali saloon dotted with faux cowboys and emoting Brit girlies. But we get a good look at lead vocalist Dave Gahan, lewdly wiggling his hips and doing his thing -- that inimitable, droning Byzantine dirge. My No. 1 favorite Depeche Mode song, however, is "Never Let Me Down Again," whose whimsical 1987 video does not do justice to its hypnotic power. It never really sank in until I bought this collection that the lyrics of "Never Let Me Down Again," which seem ambiguously gay, can also be read as a scenario of impotence and masturbation. Is this song actually a guy's ode to his penis? Fly, baby, fly!

And now for my cherished interlude, the Daniela Mercury department. I am very grateful to Nilson Junior of Curitiba, Paraná, in Brazil for sending me this video of Daniela at the Festival de Verão in Salvador da Bahia in 2004. He says it shows "how she truly gives everything she has while performing on stage." Daniela had just launched her "Carnaval Eletronico" album and had invited several DJs to join her.

This song was evidently the climax to what had probably been several hours of Daniela's typical nonstop performance. She and her troupe of sexy dancers (all in clingy, vixenish black leather) have worked the immense crowd into a surging delirium. The truly amazing part of the video starts at 4:57, when the song ends and Daniela, exhausted, goes down on her knees and bows, as if praying. As the crowd chants, "Daniela! Daniela!" her back begins to heave with sobs, and she stands up, openly weeping. A bit of fierce, masculine fist-pumping gets her voice back. Then with almost angry militance she says the following (translated by Nilson Junior), twice singing the chorus of her song, "Quero Ver Todo Mundo Sambar":

You have no idea how crazy and thrilling it feels to be on this stage, trying to do something new in a city that has such a strong and wonderful music. And it's because of this amazing traditional music that I try to reinvent my life and work as an artist. I truly believe we should always focus on the future, moving forward. Brazil has everything it takes to make it work and become a great country, and I believe in that and fight for Brazilian music everywhere I go!

Samba is my root
My national anthem
My way of praying
My carnival

Thank you, Salvador, for respecting my madness and freedom of living!

With its hyperkinetic intensity and huge range of raw emotion, this may be one of the most remarkable scenes ever recorded of a contemporary performing artist. How pat, rote and overproduced most music concerts are today. It's through her long experience with vast, open-air audiences in Brazil that Daniela Mercury has gained this kind of electrifying stage presence and power. American popular music needs to break its big-ticket addiction and get back to open-air festival grandeur – where music seems to be the voice of nature.

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.

Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.