Volumptuous women look good. Ignorant messages from mass media tell women what size to be, but female qualities-a softness, a soothing capacity that a woman has no matter what size she happens to be-sustain the more humane aspects of civilization.

The extent of his influence across jazz, across American music, and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.

Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.