..."The Limits of Frivolity In a Nation at War"

This from the IHT, something to consider:

"Years ago, when the world was locked in a deadly ideological battle, the dissident Czech writer Josef Skvorecky reminded us that in a democratic society the pinups and pornography and pulp fiction were necessary, or certainly inevitable, accompaniments to expressions of quality and genius. The freedom for one entails the freedom for the other.

And anyway, said Skvorecky, it was important not to be become so despairing of bourgeois democracy that one is tempted to replace it with something serious and revolutionary.

The media under revolutionary regimes is very serious — no national preoccupations with the mysterious deaths of dysfunctional models, just the elevated and ennobling stuff that the party leaders are concerned with.

So where does that leave us on the triviality-significance spectrum at this perilous moment in our history?"