I feel genuinely sorry for those who are so blinded by narrow partisanship that they cannot appreciate Limbaugh's energy, intelligence and satiric skill. They live in a box with bags over their heads. Though he and I hardly agree on politics (I voted for Ralph Nader last year and may go Green again in 2004), I respect Limbaugh as a political analyst and deft rhetorician who is a master of the microphone and who knows how to engage and challenge a vast audience.

Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.

Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.

Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand, which always exceeds female supply. Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop. Prostitutes, pornographers, and their patrons are marauders in the forest of archaic night.

History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence.

Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.

Computer enhancement has spread to still photography in advertisements, fashion pictorials, and magazine covers, where the human figure and face are subtly elongated or remodeled at will. Caricature is our ruling mode.