From: INVALID_SEE_SIG@example.com.invalid   
      
   Just thought this would be of a bit of interest.  Not very political,   
   despite the source.   
      
   [by the editors]   
      
       * Walker Percy's book Lost in the Cosmos includes a sketch   
         entitled "The Last Donahue Show," which imagines Phil Donahue,   
         the talk-show host who ruled daytime cable TV during the   
         Seventies and Eighties, interviewing four typical guests (a gay   
         man who cruised parks, a straight adulterer, a pregnant teen, a   
         sex therapist) and three unusual ones (John Calvin, a   
         Confederate artillerist, and an alien from outer space). Percy   
         imagined Donahue dealing with the last three with some   
         consternation, although put to the test he probably would have   
         done fine. Donahue was an intelligent and empathic listener. His   
         show unfortunately began mass media's long slide to personality,   
         pathology, and voyeurism:  endless rounds of me, me, me, first   
         presented as help, then openly offered as bear-baiting and   
         emotional striptease. By the end--that is, now--his old shows   
         looked like Platonic dialogues. Dead at 88, R.I.P.   
   --   
     _+_ From the catapult of |If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am   
   _|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |quite prepared not only to retract it, but also   
   \      /  baldwin@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it.-T. Lehrer   
   ***~~~~----------------------------------------------------------------------   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)