Love, love, love Dan Savage's books Commitment and Skipping towards Gomorrah. With a couple of differences (1. He doesn't "get" classical music; freely admits he hates Bach and Mozart. 2. He doesn't have a clue that 9/11 was an inside job; can't, or won't, understand that Osama Bin Laden is a CIA operative.) aside, he speaks for me in the very same Conservative Standard American English that I speak and think in. In all important matters (sex, love, philosophy of life and childcare) we are as one, despite his being twenty years my junior. And he is a clever, spare, perfect writer; better than me even.

Looking for something among the humanists (where I suspect, generally, I have my home) that I was sure I might agree with, I checked out a book called Animal Rites, being persuaded by the forward (by somebody other than the author of the book, one Cary Wolfe) that I would find something approaching my own philosophy/religion of humane veneration/respect of/for all beings (not necessarily animate) possessed of character or "personality." And what I found as I got into the book proper was a text professing to be little more than an extrapolation and a commentary on: Freud, Toni Morrison, Lyotard, Hemingway, Derrida, and the movie The Silence of the Lambs. So let's deal with these things in order:

1. Freud is...nothing at all. But a very unpleasant, obscenely sick-making, deliberately fraudulent nothing. There is not only no truth in Freud, there is nothing at all interesting in Freud. Talking about Freud, being serious about Freud, is the philosophical equivalent of treating farting as meaningful discourse.

2. I have never read a word written by Toni Morrison; neither shall I ever. I've seen Ms. Morrison in interview on television--accidentally walking into the room, finding the televsion on--and I very much disliked her, her manner, and her subject matter. I give not a rusty rat's patootie that she has won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel prizes for literature, there is nothing (I gather, from the reviews, the blurbs on the cover, and what Ms. Morrison herself has to say about her work) that could cause me to read a paragraph or a page of Beloved--so boring, so inimical, so nasty is its subject. And she writes about nothing else--I don't want even to say what she writes about. Not here. As a representative (prudish, Republican) female Virgo woman I know always says, "You say 'shit,' you get some on you."

3. Lyotard: head-breaking, pointless obscurity, about nothing worth thinking about, or nothing really at all; often with reference to Freud or Foucault.

4. Hemingway: mannered macho sadist; way too self-consciously hairy-chested to be real. Note: All I have ever read of Hemingway, and all I shall ever have read, are a few pages at the beginning of The Sun also Rises--for me a hideous experience, which I will not willingly risk repeating or prolonging.

5. Derrida: What I said about Lyotard (and what I will say about Foucault if the subject ever comes up).

6. The Silence of the Lambs--"brilliant"? Give me a fucking break. People who talk about TSOTL and fail to note that it is, after all, viciously, witlessly and almost inadvertantly homophobic, are idiots; most particularly are they drivelling assholes who, like Cary Wolfe, can see nothing worse about this deliberately ugly and stupid flick than that it is "heterosexist." Of course I have not seen it--Why would I?

All that said, be it further noted that, without the least inconsistency in the world, I adore Jean Baudrillard, and share every single one of his opinions about everything, except his nasty, snobbish and wrong put-down of California wines: The "War in the Gulf" did not happen, just as Baudrillard said it didn't; the difference between democrats (small 'd') and egalitarians is that for egalitarians equality is something to strive for, while for democrats it is something that has already happened.