It was a brisk winter's morn as Dennis sat, alone, at his wobbling computer desk--purchased in thinner days at an outlet store in some sparse suburban strip mall, all sweat pants and tennis shoes and what the French call les obèses--there, in his two bedroom apartment on the hill, that he meditated upon the ... Wait a minute ... I'm not a journalist!

Must have been the influence of this Variety piece in which Gore Vidal and Bill Condon find themselves vaguely interviewed by a frustrated novelist.

If anyone understands the culture war it's Vidal, who demonstrates with impeccable logic that the issue is as black and white as ignorant Christians who lack a good federal school system ruining all the fun for the enlightened cosmopolitan readers of Variety:

Vidal shakes his head slightly. There's nothing here he hasn't seen before. "What do you expect?" he says. "We have a totally ignorant people who are drenched in the blood of the lamb. We're stuck with this stone-age religion that has many, many superstitions about sex and everything else. And there is, by and large, no proper educational system for the lower classes. So how on earth are these people ever to know anything? That's why I call it the United States of Amnesia. Information does float about, the press does eventually write about everything. Even if people read the press at its most awful, they would've learned a little something. But they watch Fox News and they watch the football game and they're all just wandering around in a kind of daze with all this dumb stuff in their heads. The last election is proof of this."

That's just to get your juices going, but I should note that I, who actually live in the real world and know a lot of Christians, can vouch for the fact that they're at least as capable of tolerance as anyone (it's sort of a feature of Christianity, if you've ever actually read the Bible), and those whom I know personally are among the brightest and most dedicated scholars without a hint of prejudice in their work.

Here's an even more ridiculous quote:

"The atom bomb made absolutely no difference on foreign affairs," he says, "but Kinsey changed how the whole world looked at sex."

And that should make it clear that Vidal is just talking. He doesn't seem to have had an actual thought in decades, just cute leftist sound bites. Samuel Johnson would have little patience for Vidal:

"Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation."

Johnson: Rambler #2 (March 24, 1750)

I'm short on time so I'll just say that this is typical of the 'intellectual' élite, confidence in one's own intellectual and moral superiority, dismissive disgust at the commons--the 'herd.'

They see themselves as shepherds and can't tolerate anyone who's beaten them to the flock.