is not wholly without insight, but boy he comes close sometimes. Take his recent offering in the Nation on the gender politics of Howard Dean. Comparing the World Trade Centers to two erections has, I’m sure, been done countless times in the academy, but outside its precincts it’s just bad taste.

I always enjoy appearances of the phallic theory of gun ownership. (“Take gun control. Despite the precipitate drop in crime, white men cling ever more tightly to their guns, and the right to lock and load is a major link between pistol-packing papas and the Republican Party. Assume that most of these guys cherish their weapons for other than practical reasons, and you can see the pull of the phallic on American politics.”) Do the people who deploy this theory not realize its implications? If they’re right, then gun control is a kind of symbolic castration. How likely is that to be successful as a policy? Or as a political platform?