Posted 8:48 PM by Gene

With melodrama worthy of a certain TheAtlantic.com blogger somebody named Algie Vitalis or something emotes that Hef is "the most influential figure that American popular culture has produced blahblahblah", ignoring that much of America had a sexual awakening in France after the Armistice; that the Roaring Twenties were full of liberation talk; that Ziegfeld (whom we mentioned yesterday) made public female nudity respectable; that burlesque queens got tossed in the clink long before this miracle knew how to read; that jazz was called the devil's music; that much of the ferment that made this titan possible came later from the Beats and academe, who had little truck with this the most important man of all time. Crying such gigantic crocodile tears only makes a pygmy huge in the mirror. In the end we must recall ST. EDWARD OF MURROW's favorite Shakespearean line: "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves."

Given the emoting and the clumsy ambivalent cop-out tone at the end we'd say this has that pop-culture phreak JPOD's grimy revision marks all over it.

P. S.

He holds degrees from Dartmouth College, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the University of Chicago, where Saul Bellow was his doctoral dissertation adviser in the Committee on Social Thought.

After all that big thick head scratching he might not need Vitalis.