The lunatic fringe is more like a Spanish shawl, where the fringe makes up the entire garment.
Savvy observers occasionally note television's resemblance to the weather: Everybody loves to complain about it, but nobody can do anything to fix it.
If you believe that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, then you believe that creating wealth causes poverty, and you're an idiot.
The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards.
Unfortunately our children today seem to spend less and less time with their overworked parents, and so they draw more information about the world from the images on movie and TV screens. The true power of the media is the ability to redefine reality, to alter our expectations about what constitutes normal life. TV and the movies have abused that power by advancing the notion that wholesome, ordinary happiness is impossible.
Poor people in America today (people who are officially in poverty) have a higher standard of living - in terms of medical standards, in terms of going to college, in terms of the way people live - than middle class people did thirty years ago.
Why is it offensive to portray a creep and a murderer as a homosexual, but totally acceptable to present him as a religious Christian?
I was indeed very slow as a youngster.
It's also a more personal medium. It seems to go directly to one's brain. There are no pictures to distract.
Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?
I learned to write with my desk in the living room, next to the TV. But mostly in my head, and I try to be able to do it under any circumstances.