Dear Reader (and those of you who get the gist of this column from the guy in the next cubicle who needs to read everything out loud),

I was home in D.C. for a little less than 24 hours. I was on Special Report, I picked up some bills, checked on the less-than-Herculean progress of the work being done on our house, had a drink with a friend, and caught up on some TV I’d missed in my travels.

I’m now current on HBO’s True Blood. It’s, as you may know, a vampire series (though now there are werewolves, shape-shifters, demons, and, one can only suspect, some Henry Waxman-like mole people coming soon).

I didn’t like the show too much at first. The first season was often a slow, didactic American Gothic tale about sybaritic lychnobites, but it’s been growing on me since then. What’s really struck me this season is how far the show has strayed from its allegorical mission.

In the first season, vampires “come out of the coffin,” as it were. They’ve been hiding amongst us for thousands of years, but with the invention of a human blood alternative – “True Blood” – they decide they want equal rights. The whole theme of the first season – and apparently the books – rests on this premise, that vampires are analogous to gays. The analogy is mostly subtext, but quite often it’s closer to plain old text. Evangelical Christians hate vampires and are made to look ridiculous when they rant about their inherent evil. Opponents of the Vampire Rights Amendment insist that “God Hates Fangs!” Vampire-fetishists are “fangbangers.” You get it.

But here’s the problem: For the most part, those kooky evangelicals have turned out to be right. With a handful of exceptions, the vampires are actuallyevil. Moreover, the vamps don’t really like the bourgeois-assimilationist synthetic blood, and they won’t drink it if they can get away with it. The vampires have contempt for humans and human morality. Even the head of the vampire-rights lobby – who was originally cast as a perfect analogue for a gay-rights advocate – secretly prefers to feast on nude and nubile young girls (and, really, who can blame her?).

Now, in fairness, the creative types often claim that easy analogies are not what they are after. The Wikipedia entry on True Blood notes that Alan Ball rejects all of these comparisons as “lazy.” It’s the critics who can’t resist finding allegories, maybe because movie critics tend to resent the fact that they only get to criticize movies. But I’m not sure I always buy that defense; if the creators didn’t want to analogize, they wouldn’t have made it so easy for the viewer to do exactly that.

Regardless, this all brings to mind 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to 28 Days Later. In the sequel, which came out during the worst stretch of the Iraq war, the U.S. military goes to Britain to restore order after a horrific zombie outbreak (technically, they weren’t zombies, they were humans infected with the “rage virus”; distinctions matter, people). The Yanks also bring with them the first wave of British refugees from the outbreak. The Americans set up a “Green Zone” (get it?) and get to work.

Well, of course, things go ass over tea kettle. The Green Zone is overrun. Zombie-movie themes unfold. The response to all of this from critics was predictable. “It’s hard not to think of Iraq and the fear of Islam generated in the Dubya era as the U.S. occupying force starts shooting and bombing without regard to collateral damage,” Peter Travers opined in Rolling Stone.

Let’s leave aside the fact that what is intellectually hard for Peter Travers – quite possibly the most intellectually whorish major movie critic in America (discuss amongst yourselves) – might well be intellectually easy for a small child with a light head injury. Here’s the problem: In the actual context of the film, analogizing the “fear of Islam” to the fear of eyeball-eating, throat-ripping, phlegm-oozing zombies does not make “fear of Islam” seem irrational or overheated. It makes it downright obligatory. Moreover, worrying about the spread of the threat, given that the rage virus can be passed through saliva, never mind a good bite to your pancreas, isn’t a sign of right-wing dementia; it’s a prerequisite of sanity. If you take the analogy seriously, the Americans in the Iraqi Green Zone should have felt even more free to open fire, not less.

Likewise, if gay-rights activists were on the ball, they’d recognize that the allegorical plot of True Blood is doing them no favors.

Making a Mosquery of the Truth

I cannot be alone in thinking that the mosque debate is getting really old. But since I still seem to be in the minority, here are three quick points that I think need to be given more air.

1. The liberals are the ideologues on this. Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama have claimed countless times that they are non-ideological pragmatists. But their position, right or wrong, is wildly ideological. Meanwhile, conservatives who say, “Fine, build your mosque, just not right there,” are the pragmatists. But conservative pragmatism is never recognized as such if it breaks with the liberal party line. When conservatism breaks with liberalism, it must be denounced as ideology or, of course, bigotry.

2. Stop calling it a mosque. Defenders of Cordoba House sometimes say, “It’s not a mosque, it’s a cultural-affairs center with a prayer room,” or some such, as if this were a defense. To me, that makes it worse, not better. If this were some small, one-story mosque for the handful of Muslims living nearby to pray in, the arguments over freedom of religion would have more merit. But this would be a 13-story institution with an obvious political component to it. That strikes me as gaudy and an invitation to mischief. This is another point I think non-bigoted Americans understand better than the condescending supporters of the mosque.

3. The staggering hypocrisy of liberals is really an amazing thing. Everywhere you look, you hear these scandalized liberals talking as if it were beyond the pale to criticize religion. You’d never know that these overnight stalwarts of religious freedom had been demonizing Christian conservatives, Mormons, and increasingly orthodox Jews for years. It’s as if these people never wanted to ban a crèche, outlaw a Christian group, or claim that Jewish supporters of Israel suffer from dual loyalties. I’m not making a two-wrongs-make-a-right point here. I do think that some of the rhetoric on the right goes too far – Newt’s Nazi analogy, for instance. But it is amazing how establishment liberalism can spend years demonizing organized religion in this country only to turn on a dime when it comes to defending the Islamic equivalent of NikeTown two blocks from Ground Zero.

Chicken and Waffles, My Friends, Chicken and Waffles

In Bethany Beach, Del., there’s a place called Patsy’s. On Sundays, their signature brunch item is chicken and waffles. I confess that I’d never heard of the dish until about a year ago, when I saw a Throwdown with Bobby Flayepisode about it. But let me say now, and I never exaggerate, that this may be the greatest dish ever created. I could see how it could be bad: if there was bad fried chicken, or bad waffles. But if the fried chicken is good, and the waffles are good, then the two combine for a geometric increase in goodness. Really. So good. So, so, so good.

Various and Sundry

Of course, when you finish a plate of chicken and waffles, you’re apt to suffer from pandiculation, which is the stretching and stiffening one feels after a good sleep or a meal of chicken and waffles. That in turn brings us to better dentistry through rocketry.

Oh, no, wait. It brings us to this week’s vocab. Earlier in this “news”letter I used the word lychnobite, which is someone who turns night into day, like a fisherman who casts after sundown or a nocturnal golfer who likes to go night putting with the dean’s daughter. Which reminds me, according to Tracy Jordan (in 30 Rock), vampires are the world’s greatest golfers but their curse is that they can never prove it.

Meanwhile, some folks may have taken offense at my earlier disparagement of Henry Waxman, whose philtrum is wider than a human thumb. Fair enough, but can anyone really deny that he would look completely natural hunched-over, naked, and smudged with dirt, eating a small live rodent (sort of like Gollum with a fish)? Oh, and for the record, your philtrum is the vertical groove on the median line of your upper lip. Meanwhile, I’m increasingly interested in holophrasis, so if you have any good examples of it in modern life, shoot me a line. Feel free to share any other thoughts about the G-File. I’m elozable.