[Sarah] Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.

My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility

We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.

Children are monsters of unbridled egotism and will, for they spring directly from nature, hostile intimations of immorality.

Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.

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.

The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.