Tom!

If you know nothing about Sturges, how can you suppose that his work will make anyone curl up on the floor in revulsion? Well, of course, the Kansas family is your invention, so you can make them do anything you want, including fly to Oz in their house.

How amusing that you will base your opinion of the value of someone's work on your evaluation of the political slant of an online zine that has written a review of said work. This is pretty close to the edge of derivitive value judgment. The opinion of the work itself is not even yours, it's theirs. Your response is wholly reaction, and reaction times two at that: you react to their opinion, and you react to their position on Tom's Scale of Political Veracity (an oxymoron, btw). If Salon Magazine said a cloudless sky at noon was blue, you would declare it puce without looking out the window.

And what about the beauty and nascent sexuality of minors? If any display implying or celebrating those characteristics is to be defined as pedophilia, many doting mommies on the beauty pageant circuit, some of whom are very traditional Southern matrons, will be shocked and insulted. And what about those cheerleading coaches, huh? They ought to be locked up! The halftime shows at the basketball games are enough to make me curl up on the gym floor in revulsion! ...Not really. But I have an advantage over you: I have seen the actual cheers, so any opinion I have of them is my own.

I don't know anything about Sturges, either, except what critics in Salon have written. In that regard, you and I are just the same.

There, there--
Mary Anne