Friday October 06, 2006

LITERALLY. David Brooks says, oh yeah, you liberals think the Foley scandal is bad, well, there's an underage seduction in The Vagina Monologues but you liberals love that, don't you?

Stunned onlookers point out to Brooks that The Vagina Monologues is a play, whereas Mark Foley is a real person. Ann Althouse -- she takes pictures, you know! -- responds:

The third letter notes Brooks's omission of the "simple point" that what Mark Foley did was "real" and "The Vagina Monologues" is "make-believe." But, again, the enthusiasm for "The Vagina Monologues" is very real.

There are a lot of things you could say to this. You could try to explain to these people the concept of fictional characters. You could try to explain that not every character in every scene speaks for the author. You could try to explain that these cows are very small, while those cows are far away.

It would all be a waste of time. Some kinds of ignorance are so obviously the result of hard, patient work that all you can really do about them is marvel at God's creation and move on.

UPDATE. I just had to haul this comment on up to the front of the class: "Millions of people enjoyed Silence of the Lambs, and yet if a Republican were caught engaging in murder and cannibalism, you can only imagine how the hypocritical liberals would react."

UPDATE II. Comments at Professor Althouse's place also augment the hilarity, but in a different way:

Didn't the left give us performance art and haven't leftists, in their never ending pursuit of absolute equality, instructed us the everything is art and that we're all artists?

When'd we do that? I've got to start coming to more of the meetings.