It was inevitable, I suppose, that sooner or later terrorism would become bad performance art. It's easy to condemn pipe-bomb-boy for callously putting people at lethal risk with his toys, but difficult to summon up the kind of personal hatred for this perpetrator that Al-Qaeda's flamboyant fanatic nut-jobs have so richly earned. I think our ire might be more properly directed elsewhere -- at all the people who have cooperated in dumbing down the definition of `art' so completely that Luke Helder actually thought he was doing it.

Once upon a time, art had something to do with achieving a meeting of minds between artist and audience. The artist's job was to rework the symbols and materials of his culture into expressions that affirmed and explored the values of that culture and pleased audiences. Artists operated within interpretive traditions that they shared with the non-artists in the audience. The truly able artist earned the privilege of making his work personal and individual, but only by successfully finding an audience and communicating with it in acceptable conventional terms first.

In the late 19th century Western culture began to admit a new definition of `art' and a new role for artists. Under the influence of modernism and various post-modern movements, artists began to see their job as the systematic subversion of the interpretive traditions they had inherited. "Back to zero!" was the cry. After zero, the new goal could no longer the meeting of minds in a culturally shared commons, but rather that the audience's minds should be invaded by the disruptive brillance of the artist's individual insight.

In the hands of a few early moderns -- Stravinsky, Brancusi, Picasso, Joyce -- the new agenda produced astonishingly fine work. In the hands of too many others, it produced vacuous, narcissistic nonsense. Luke Helder inherited its most vulgar form -- the notion that all the artist is required to do is "make a statement" about the contents of his own muddled mind, and it's the world's job to catch up.

It is outrageous -- but hardly surprising -- that Jimmy Carter would put himself into a position where he will be shamelessly used as a propaganda foil against his own government. To be sure, he has done it before. By his participation in Potemkin tours of Cuban factories and other sites at this juncture, however, he is not only lending credibility to a regime that makes no secret of its hostility to the United States. The ex-President is overtly undercutting the current President's policy of insisting on regime change in Cuba and the liberation of the long-suffering people of that island as a precondition to normalizing economic and political relations between the two countries.

By saying that some of Vidal's rhetoric "may or may not be hyperbole," and giving his own disagreement with Vidal's insane 9/11 remedies a big "so what", Cooper is basically arguing that specific ideas and statement simply don't matter. What matters, as Cooper states elsewhere in the review, is that Vidal "writes not from hatred but from a profound love betrayed and defiled, proudly casting himself as a noble defender of "the American Republic against the American Global Empire." What matters is that Vidal has been prolific, that he stands in opposition to things Cooper doesn't like, and that he writes "eloquently." Gore's heart is in the right place, so why bust his chops on an exaggeration or two?

Bush is now presumptively defining Democrats as obstructionists (and nonindependent thinkers) simply for being members of their party. Kirk has not cast a single vote in the Senate -- indeed, he has repeatedly expressed his desire to work with the president.

Life is good when you can kick back in the garden outside your home, with a notebook connected wirelessly to the Internet, a glass of cold Fanta and a cute cat right by your side, and watch a live stream from American TV on Ayn Rand. Ahh. If those Muslim kooks want to take this away from me, they're going to have to fight pretty damn hard. A toast, to progress!

Recently, a Swarthmore student was arrested by the FBI for possessing pornographic images of pre-pubescent children and soliciting sex from a minor over the internet. And wouldn't you know it but everyone came to his defense, writing letters to the Phoenix (our school paper) that this student posed no threat to the community. One girl, who is a student and has a 5 year old-daughter, responded to these letters by claiming that as a mother, she thought the pedophile posed a grave threat to the community. Well, she was lambasted in private forums as worse than a pedophile because she had chosen (gasp!) not to have an abortion when she was a pregnant teenager. So that about seems to be the consensus here, that a girl who chooses not to have an abortion is worse than a pedophile. Oh well. I suppose this sort of thing happening at Swarthmore won't surprise many, but I was shocked.

Collectively, human activity releases approximately 7 billion tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere. Natural processes release 150 billion tons each year. In other words, humans are responsible for less than 4% of the CO2 release each year...

Only occasionally is there more than this. One bag reveals a severed human foot, the toenails painted a heartbreaking violet. And this is what shocks you, what sits you down with a nauseated, displaced feel of a world spinning awry. Not the gore or the lack of it, but the small details that point tellingly to fragile lives caught in the maelstrom.