The Necessary Role Of The Fixer In An Over-Governed Society–Doing Whatever It Takes

John Garaffa ran ‘Johnnie’s Smoke Shop’, a not-so-pretty store on Main Street – cigars, candy, girlie magazines, newspapers, whoopie cushions, and lottery tickets.  Johnnie’s also was the depot for New England Flyer, a bus service run out of Brattleboro for workers still employed in those few factories still operating in Waterbury, Meriden, Wallingford and the old Massachusetts mill towns of Chicopee, Taunton, Worcester, and Lawrence.  Jackie’s had been in the Garaffa family for three generations, founded in 1928 by John’s grandfather who had finally put enough away to move out of the  Calabrese and Sorrentino neighborhoods of Wooster Square and become more American.  Johnnie’s had started off as news stand – papers from Boston and New York delivered daily by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad – but had gradually diversified into magazines, tobacco, and chocolates.  John’s father added joke items, pornography, cheap candy, rolling papers and bus tickets.  The store went from high-end service to the town’s lawyers, bankers, and doctors, to a more transient and lower class trade.

By the time John Garaffa  took over the store, it had become a fixture of downtown.  Shabbier, more rundown, and tackier than the still-respectable pharmacies, dress shops, and haberdasheries on Main and West Main Streets, it still did a good business. While professionals now had their papers home delivered, and bought flowers and chocolates from high-end stores in Farmington and West Hartford, the ‘less desirable element’ of New Brighton took up the slack.  Puerto Ricans from the North End, Poles from the East End, and regulars on their way from Springfield to Wallingford bought more than enough to keep Johnnie in business.

After three generations in New Brighton the Garaffas were well-known and well-placed.  They contributed generously to the Democratic party and especially to ward aldermen who oversaw downtown and could add or subtract the little favors that made a difference to doing business.  They were friends with the big Italian construction companies – cement, sand-and-gravel, sidewalks, and foundations – the Jewish furriers and jewelers, and the Silesian delicatessens on Broad Street, and they were on close terms with the Scuzzi family, the local branch of the Gambinos of New York.

Johnnie Garaffa saw opportunity in New Brighton, and like any good American entrepreneur saw his niche.  While the Italians controlled the unions, and the construction and shipping industries; while the West Enders owned and managed the town’s mills and factories and the Irish ran City Hall, there was no one looking after the little man – the one without connections but who needed something fixed, problems with the rent, the gas bill, the neighbors, or the police.   Johnnie, with his connections to the factories, the unions, and the Mob, was perfect as a fixer; someone who could facilitate, intercede, call for and give favors to help the ordinary, working class.  He secured generous donations to the Police Benevolent Association thanks to his friends on Broad Street who provided cheap, newly immigrant labor to work on additions and renovations for the homes in the West End in return for cash for the police.  He interceded with the Principal of New Brighton High for parents whose children were failing.  The principal had political ambitions – the mayoralty was not an impossible goal – and Johnnie knew the right people on the electoral commission and the Democratic party to give the principal a head start.  Soon after connections were made, the boy who had been dismissed for failing grades was reinstated, given special attention and honors.

John Garaffa never involved himself in dirty business – that was for the town’s heavy hitters. In his life he had certainly suggested or implied the use of muscle and other ‘extrajudicial’ means of coercion, but always kept many degrees of remove.  The worst he could ever be accused of was complicity, and even then there was always the possibility of benign compliance – the problem fixed without extraordinary measures.

John Garaffa lived in a far more permissive and less controlling age.  The age of sanctimony was still decades away, and life was managed more simply, more directly, and with fewer consequences than in years to come. Favors, gifts, back-scratching, and backdoor quid pro quos were still the lubrication of the in-between generations – those born after the laissez-faire, no-holds-barred era of the Robber Barons but before the progressive movements to purify and expunge any traces of inequality and unfairness.  The reason why John Garaffa was so successful is because he filled in the gaps, closed the cracks, provided the putty and grouting necessary in a necessarily imperfectly constructed world.

Garaffa’s grandfather had come over on the boat from Naples in 1889, landing in New York and then making his way up to New Haven.  He had left Italy, his large family, and his small holdings behind for America.  He knew that he would never see them again, never return to Alife and the few but gentle comforts of the Mezzogiorno.

When he arrived in New Haven he was taken in by his fellow Sorrentinos and taken in hand by the Italian ‘infrastructure’ of the day.  Immigrant Italians could never assume or expect fair treatment, justice, economic advantage or opportunity at the hands of the Irish and native Americans; and turned to their own for favor, protection, and help.  The Mafia was the only municipal administration and police force that the Italians knew.  Rather than rely on a system of laws, they turned to a system of favors, an egalitarian one which did not measure favors by economic value but by degree of tribute, promise, or respect.

While in spirit Grandfather Garaffa was an ideal American – enterprising, risk-taking, adventurous, and canny – he was an Italian in practice.  He knew that only by working this system of favors, quid pro quo, backscratching, and mutual respect could he get the permits, licenses, and security he needed to get ahead.   It was an efficient system, one far more direct and honest than the official one.  While City Hall bureaucrats delayed applications and certifications because of apathy, indifference, or ill-disguised lack of respect for Italian newcomers,  the process could be sped up by a combination of offers and threats which an individual alone could never manage.  The time between an initial, well-placed complaint to the local Italian bosses and public action was only a matter of days.  More serious matters such as criminal offense or assault and subsequent indifference or inactivity on the part of police and prosecutors had to be referred up through the hierarchy; but justice was always served.

The new Italian immigrants wanted nothing more than to be completely American.  One of the things they had fled, especially in Sicily was La Cosa Nostra, and it was ironic that here in free, liberal America, they were forced once again to turn to them.  Yet, that was the way of immigration – to keep the optimism and can-do American spirit alive and well while turning to old, tried and true practical means of enabling it.

It was not surprising, then, that Johnnie Garaffa became a fixer.  He understood that nothing had changed between his grandfather’s day and his – one always did what it took to get ahead; and while the rules of the game had changed, gaming the system to find loopholes and thread through them, understanding balances of private and public power and above-ground and underground influences had not changed.  He was a master of working both sides of the street, currying favor and staying out of trouble, always maintaining a positive balance on his ledger, and counting more friends than enemies.

Edson Senna was an Angolan fixer.  A veteran of the long, bloody civil war between the government and southern rebels, Senna, because of his intelligence, fearlessness, and understanding that wars were for winning at any cost, quickly rose through the service to the rank of captain.  By the time he was decommissioned, Edson knew everyone who mattered on both sides of the conflict.  The years immediately after the truce in Angola were chaotic, anarchic ones.  There was no rule of law, no police, a crumbling physical infrastructure, and divided, hostile social one.  It was the ideal environment in which Edson could and did thrive. He was able to arrange anything.  The importation of cars from Namibia, quick Angolan registration and titling, no taxes, and no problems was simple.  He crossed the border, bought illegally imported cars for a song, drove them back to Angola, sold them to Angolans and foreigners for three times the price he paid, and paid only a small fraction of his revenues in bribes and payoffs.

He was hired by foreigners, desperate to avoid the crowds, shakedowns, and intimidation at the airport, to simply get him on the plane.  He arranged for shipments of everything from German blenders to French small arms.  Visas, work permits, exit documents…all were easy to arrange.  Edson made thousands, lived well, and served his country.

Of course he had his critics.  Engaging Edson and circumventing the official system was to perpetuate government anarchy, the liability of lawlessness, and to postpone the establishment of civil order.  Yet even the most ardent believers in social reform and the reconstructing of the country, hired Edson for one thing or another.  In a chaotic social environment, why should an enterprising, savvy, and canny man be criticized?

Most American appreciate the rule of law in principle, but see how easily and how often it is abused.  Money, the enabler and corruptor of capitalism and liberal democracy, still defines politics, religions, and social mobility.  Government, which the Founding Fathers envisaged as being the people’s advocate, has become the people’s nemesis.  We feel trapped within a government system of restrictive laws, intrusive public behavior, and narrow political interests rather than liberated by it.  Jefferson envisaged individual enterprise having value only within a supportive and respected society.  Community and individual were two essential, indispensable parts of the same system.  He would be appalled today by what has been a supreme arrogation of government authority expressed in repressive rules, regulations, and stipulations; and by the inchoate and irrational public movements for identity and personal satisfaction.

Which is why many Americans want to bring back Johnnie Garaffa and Edson Senna and the rule of unofficial law – not to dark web operatives clandestine 007 assassins who have always existed and always will; but to ordinary fixers who take care of business when business is hard to come by.  A world without so many harnesses, reins, and traces; one in which the individual feels less manipulated and used than independent. 

It is no accident or surprise that the Wild West still holds an allure; or that it is still an icon of American individualism.  We may be happy that duels, renegades, and shootouts are things of the past; and that the rule of law prevails; but the more we are taken into what seems to be perpetual protective custody, the more we mistrust government as an institution.

Where are the Johnnie Garaffas and Edson Sennas when we really need them?

Sexual Allure–Millennia Of Come Hither Likely To Last For Many More

An economist who worked for a prestigious international development firm, one which prided itself on social responsibility and uniform adherence to gender appropriateness, was surprised to read a memo from its CEO to all staff.  “Heretofore”, he wrote, “all employees will dress in a manner respectful of each other and expressive of the best and most serious intents of the company”.  He needn’t have said more. No reference to exaggerated décolleté, sleeveless blouses, tight, revealing skirts, or ‘business sheaths’ was necessary.  A line had been crossed at Baker International, and everyone knew it.



“I am a woman’ was the credo of an organization which promoted women’s rights in Africa, championed the struggle against male oppression in Latin America, and stood behind veiled women in Iran and Saudi Arabia.  No less was it on the front lines of American women’s struggle for sexual equality and their fight against misogyny and patriarchy.  Yet what do do, pondered the CEO with what had become a workplace of sexual admission, no different from the backstreets of Amsterdam or the cages of Bombay.  Women in the K Street offices of one of the most prestigious eleemosynary institutions in Washington were beginning to look like tarts.

Not everyone on the board of directors agreed; and in fact there was a near mutiny from the most progressive feminist quarters whose members insisted that no attempt to corral, hogtie, whip-and-bind female employees to suit male Victorian tastes would be tolerated.  Women could and should be able to wear whatever suited them, however ‘provocative’ such dress might seem to unwoke male employees.  If men responded sexually to female attire which displayed the beauty of God’s creation, then so be it.  That was men’s problem, not that of women who were simply celebrating their female identity.

Of course most men saw the situation quite differently.  Sitting across from a beautiful young woman dressed in a scant, revealing dress; scented and accessorized; and sexually provocative in everything but word and demeanor was distracting at best, painful at worst.  How was a normal American man supposed to sit across from a deliciously attired, lightly perfumed, and coquettishly posed young woman without thinking about sex? It was prejudicial of senior management to allow such dress in the workplace, men complained.   Policies that promoted women’s equality should never ignore the polices of nature.  Men are simply and forever attracted to women’s appearance, the more revealing and seductive the better.  It has always been so.

From the sculptures of Ancient Greece and Rome to Khajuraho; from Degas, Renoir, Matisse, Ingres, and Picasso; to People, E!, and Entertainment Today; from Elle and Vogue to Harper’s Bazaar, the female form is displayed, honored, sold, and marketed today as it has been for millennia.  To men a woman is by nature alluring, seductive, and attractive.  A prize, a trophy, and a victory. 



A war was fought over Helen of Troy, and few could resist Cleopatra, seductive queen of Egypt and seducer of Roman emperors. 

From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthroned i' the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.

Every family in the West End of New Brighton sent their children to Mrs. Lennor’s Dancing School, a finishing touch on a a social education which would have to withstand the influences of college, New York, and San Francisco.  Mrs. Lennor was a strict disciplinarian, not that much different from the Sisters Mary Joseph and Mary Francis who provided the Catholic sons and daughters of the community with a solid, moral, and irreproachably modest religious training.

Boys on one end of the waxed, finely polished hardwood floors; girls on the other; and at the sound of Mrs. Lennor’s clacker the boys charged over to the girls’ side, the fastest getting the most desirable, , the slowest getting the fattest.  Despite claims to Victorian civility and upper class reserve, Mrs. Lennor encouraged the most basic sexual, predatory notions.  No one complained, objected, or cried foul.  Mrs. Lennor’s basement dancing school was the way things were, the way the world worked, the way boys and girls were made.

Today of course, Mrs. Lennor would never exist nor ever be considered.  If there were ever such a thing as a dancing school, then boys and girls would each in turn race across the floor.  Boys and girls would equally numbered so that there could be no chance of one fat girl left alone, crying and disconsolate.  The state – or its private surrogates – would have intervened, engineered the occasion to be gender neutral, equal, and fair.

Even so, what is one to make of the provocative, sexy, alluring, come-hither images of young women on the covers of both female- and male-oriented magazines?  The sexy, off-the-shoulder, winking images of Hollywood, Istanbul, and Bollywood stars?  The advice columns so predictably traditional?  The stories of luscious, dominant, persuasive males and their willing, complaisant, happy and agreeable female partners?  Within the acceptable modern concept of the strong, independent female, the age-old story of romance, seduction, and wiles persists.  The Turkish dizi is not an exaggeration.  It is a playout of the everyday drama of sexual interest.



Even the most talented, serious, and experienced actresses have chosen to be photographed in provocative poses.



Which is why modern feminism has lost its way.  While rightly focusing on women’s civil and legal rights and economic opportunity, it has distorted the millennia-old equation of sexual dynamics.  While there may be a few outliers on the gender spectrum, most men and women fall under the bell curve, inevitably drawn to each other for better or for worse, attracted by the same sexual allure favored by the Greeks.  Even the most casual look at statues, frescoes, paintings, and drawings  of ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Persians, and Indians reveals the same sexual allure of women – jewelry, make up, elegant and inviting clothes – that exists today and has always existed.  The female form, nude, sublime, elegant, has been sculpted by artists for 5000 years.   The days of work-booted, flannel-shirted, unshaved women as statements of female empowerment in the 70s went the way of mullets and tie-dies.  Women went back to frills and décolleté  after this unnatural experimentation.



Of course sexual dynamics have changed.  Men are more on their guard, women more alert to sexual improprieties, and society as a whole has moved away from the idea of male sexual empire.  But that having been said, little has changed since Athens and Rome.  The images of women today are no different than those on the frescoes of Pompeii or Alexandria; artists now as then appreciate the female body as unique, especially beautiful, and symbolic of grace and natural elegance.  Women still – and perhaps more than ever – dress to attract a mate.  Despite claims to the contrary – that  women’s dress is simply an expression of female uniqueness – women and men both know what the finery is all about.

And more power to beautiful women who add to a world increasingly monochrome and narrowly focused.  Thanks to women in finery, jewels, eyeliner, and sleek fashion.  Glory be to women at their unashamedly attractive, alluring, and seductive.



Culture bespeaks volumes.  Men on an elevator in Rome  turn their eyes to a beautiful women entering the car.  Men on an American one lift their eyes to the ceiling, to the accreditation notice, to the lighted floor buttons.  It is not that Italian men are unreconstructed or unreformed; but that they have not lost an appreciation for sexual difference and sexual attraction.  American men have been instructed to tune out their instincts, their natural tendencies, and their sexual desires; and by such complaisance have devalued women, sex and sexual difference.

Of course male and female behavior is distributed over a continuum.  After decades of feminism modern women now acknowledge their more collaborative, communicative style; their particular ability to care and nurture; their acuity and perception and understanding subtlety and behavioral cues; their emotional sensitivity to violence and aggression? Is there any doubt, given the reams of publications on fashion, traditional female sexuality, that women have an alluring, sexy side that men don’t have; or that no matter how much mothers try, they simply cannot get their daughters to play with Army tanks and big trucks?



While many women and men act very much alike; and while there are some exaggerated examples of sexuality on either end of the Bell Curve, men and women have never been and will never be the same and will always attracted each other thanks to that difference.

D.H.Lawrence, perhaps better than any writer, understood the primacy of heterosexual difference and the unique sexual union of man and woman.  There is no misogyny, patriarchy, or male dominance in Lawrence’s books.  Despite some antagonistic claims, Lawrence is the feminist writer, as interested in female character, desire, demands, and identity as any author.  He was concerned with mutual satisfaction, the ultimate consummation.  While he was aware that all couples must resolve issues of dominance and submission, he was never male-oriented.  Both men and women struggle to find their own, proper place on the scale of sexual dynamics.

If one were to believe the cant and presumption of critics and commentators, heterosexual dynamics is either passé or already dead and buried, replaced by a gender-neutral and neutralized code of conduct.  Of course, this discourse remains in academia and in the progressive enclaves of Boston and the East Coast.  Women still say ‘come hither’ and men follow them; and while the rules of the game have been altered somewhat, they do not affect the nature of the game or its outcome.

‘Come hither’ and ‘come with me’ are here to stay.

The Delights Of Popular Culture–What’s With Highbrow Anyway? We Are All Middlebrow

Noah Berlatsky, writing in The New Republic (10.13) lamented the demise of ‘true’ culture – that higher-level appeal to the most sophisticated and evolved tastes of society.  Such culture, he said, was being eroded if not destroyed by a popular culture which has no universally redeeming values, no intellectual foundation, and no purpose in a necessarily pedestrian life sorely in need of salvation.

Berlatsky’s plaint is a familiar one – America is losing its soul to popular culture.  We are a country more characterized by Las Vegas glitz, Hollywood, Beyoncé, throw-away fashion, and Happy Meals.  Intellectuals can only smile at America’s fancies and inanities.  If Americans were only more like the French, they say. Why haven’t they ever had a Sartre, Camus, or a New Wave?

Berlatsky goes on:

What matters are these soulless, hollow, fungible icons, and the assurance that they will continue forever as around them all the mere humans effervesce like ghosts. This art isn't about empathy or love. Instead, it's about worship, about pledging fealty to our invented, charismatically uncaring, gods. Our corporate fictions offer the blank joy of not caring, whether about creators, actors, strangers, or ourselves.

With one final kick at corporate greed and its devilish distortion of empathy and good, Berlatsky dismisses popular culture for its divorce from meaning.  It has no purpose other than to entertain, and by resorting to pure entertainment – i.e. hollow men in tights and evil villains – it dumbs us down to the lowest possible level.  Where are the moral considerations of evil? Or the consequences of action? Or gender issues?

The argument, of course, denies the real vitality of American culture and the ineffable connection it has with millions of followers from Africa to the Arctic. If our culture is derivative, it is irresistible.  As much intellectuals would like to deny it, most of the world cares more about Iron Man than Kant.  More importantly this popular culture is far more seminal than any Left Bank reflections on being and nothingness.  It has gone viral,  and soon, with  America leading the way towards a virtual world where the very concept of reality is changing, personal fantasy, idealization, and make-believe will forevermore bury highbrow culture.

Classical music in the United States is dying.  According to a former violinist for the Metropolitan Opera, there are a number of signs:

¶The recent labor disputes of American orchestras due to decreased budgets and donor support.

¶The reduction or outright cancellation of Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic tours and concerts in the parks.

¶The demise of classical music radio stations across America.

¶The increased media focus on rock and pop superstars, while classical music managements have difficulty booking concerts for their artists. (NY Times, Letters to the Editor, 11.24.12)

As a result, most symphony orchestras rely on the canon – the fewer concert-goers there are, the more conservative they feel they must be.  Why take the chance of alienating both old and young with a complex Liszt or Benjamin Britten?  Ironically but not surprisingly, the more predictable and over-performed the music, the less people enjoy it and stay away in even greater numbers.

Western classical music suffers from many ills. Perhaps first and foremost, as suggested by the last point above, it is the very epitome of an archaic, irrelevant past – ‘dead white men’ in common parlance.  Most symphony orchestra rarely play any 20th century music, and even the sprightly Mozart cannot draw big audiences for whom an unbelievable array of modern, contemporary music and entertainment is available. Secondly, the venue – the concert hall – is as formal, deadening, and insufferably enclosed as can be.  Compare this to a rock concert.

Now more than ever, with the ascendency and influence of Donald Trump, middle-brow popular culture has never been more important and universal. Gone are the days of Camelot where  Pablo Casals played at the White House, Robert Frost read his poetry at JFK’s inauguration, Jackie was the epitome of European grace, charm, and elegance.  Gone are the morally righteous days of Jimmy Carter who abhorred excess, preached parsimony and restraint; and gone are the days of George H.W. Bush, a patrician in the Roman style – generous, respectful, dutiful, and principled. In its place are gold bracelets, a rough-and-tumble macho braggadocio, a Jay Gatsby lifestyle, and a concentration of American power – not the political power that Robert Reich and his colleagues are used to but financial, retail, real estate, entertainment power all concentrated in one man.

The Trump years began as  soap opera. When would the Trump children start fighting over access to Father? Would Melania continue to live her life of luxury and privilege in New York, dismissing Foggy Bottom, Capitol Hill, and press club events? Would her life be any different from the Hollande and Sarkozy wives and loves who came and went from the Elysees as they pleased?

Two years into the Trump presidency, the soap opera continues, episode after episode of jealousy, spite, family disputes, greed, ambition, and sex.  For the first time and once and for all, Americans have a president who truly represents them – not politically, but culturally.  Who would not want a trophy wife, mistresses, yachts, tropical resorts, glitz, bright lights and show.  Trump’s supporters knew from the beginning that this was man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the mean streets of New York, not one of hearings, legislation, lobbyists, and backdoor deals.  They knew that they were electing a showman and a vaudevillian; and that 1600 Pennsylvania would become the center of a three-ring circus.  Only the pundits are surprised and nonplussed, still smarting from Trump’s surprising victory and still unsure how to cover him.

Trump press conferences, reviled by the Left and the establishment media, are watched by ordinary Americans, not because they will learn anything substantial about policy, but because of the performance?  Gone is Clinton’s judicious parsing of language, the careful and thoughtful evasion of pointed questions, the respectful demeanor.  Americans tune in because they want to see Trump fire people, yell at insolent reporters, storm in and out.  Anyone who thinks that just because Donald Trump is President he will change his ways is just whistlin’ Dixie.

The reason why Turkish soap operas are so popular is not because of the beauty of the female leads (stunning), the suspense of the cannily-devised plots, the comeuppance of the bad, the recognition of righteousness and right action, and the victory of love; but because what happens every week in Istanbul can happen anywhere in America whether on Wall Street, Washington, or Dubuque….Especially Washington, for Turkish tales of greed, ambition, and impossibly immoral action could only happen here.

Americans  watch the Trump soap opera with as much delightful anticipation as they do Kara Para Aşk.  They have have willingly suspended belief, disassociated themselves from the supposedly ‘serious’ development and dénouement of the events in Washington, and are as devoted to the American serial as Turks are to theirs.  What will happen to Elif?  Will she escape the malicious set-up engineered by her uncle and aunt? Will Omer solve the case and win Elif’s heart? Will the dastardly be caught and put behind bars?  Will Trump be caught in a web of lies, sabotaged by his own confidants, exposed for all his wrongdoings and evil intent?

Donald Trump loves all of this – he is the center-stage, high-stepping vaudevillian, carny barker, trapeze artist, and sideshow attraction all rolled into one.  He loves the attention, and loves it even more when his critics cry for blood.  His critics, schooled as they are in old, archaic modes of opposition (policy, logic, defined purpose, values) are hopelessly outmatched.  They refuse to wrestle in his ring, object to his rules, and are beaten before they enter the arena.
What is the point of living in Washington, after all, if it isn’t for the grand guignol of national politics.  Washington is center stage, not for serious political inquiry or debate, but for melodrama, soap opera tears and remorse, and best of all vengeance, vendetta, and retribution.

As much as the elite Eastern Establishment would like to hope otherwise, we are a middlebrow nation, dismissive of intellectual pretention, and solidly rooted in popular culture – a culture which has emerged from the populace, never imposed, and always subject to whim, fancy, and fickle preference.  We Americans fled Europe four hundred years ago exactly to escape cultural feudalism, the imposition not only of state religion but state culture.  In America there were no academies of right thinking, not arbiters of expression or cultural preference, no historical determinism.  America’s pop culture is so popular here and abroad because of its democracy.  We all are no different from the actors on As The World Turns or Dallas.  We need no canon, no Louis XIV, no Oxford, Sorbonne, no Medicis or Tudors.  Human nature is simple – self-serving, defensive, territorial, jealous, ambitious, and expansive – and the great fun is seeing it played out in its infinite variety, not looking for insights.

Fewer and fewer Americans are content to sit on their hands at an Elgar concert, stand respectfully before a Picasso or Rembrandt, or read Proust and Joyce.  Most of us want some fun out of life.  People Magazine, E!, and Entertainment Today are our preferred reading.  Soap operas are preferred viewing, and sound-and-light performances our preferred way to spend a Saturday night.

So be it and bravo for it.  American popular culture is an expression of our history, our spirit, our democracy, and our unassailable individualism.