I don't exactly recommend that you read The Leftersons. Or maybe I do. It's evidence, the sort of thing that should be noted, tabulated, and for better or worse, remembered. (My favorite part is the Hammer-and-Sickle clock the Leftersons have in their house.) The strip is hosted by a site which proves how plastic American political and cultural frames of reference are: it makes the Bush family name synonymous with a kind of raw-meat-eating, take-no-prisoners, keep-hounding-the-Clintons-dammit conservatism that the placid, mildly peevish fratboy living at 1600 Pennsylvania would seem hard pressed to embody. But I suppose that just means he'll have to work at it.

The following is part of a very long piece of email which I got yesterday, from two youngsters who signed themselves "Ryan and Jacob."

"The people on this planet are all fakes because the societies have made them this way. Ideas that populate people's minds have no logic or purpose. Concepts such as religion, god, morality, individualism, freedom, identity, happiness, love and billions of others are all just memes. Like parasites they infect the minds
and spread from one person to the next. They have no point or purpose; they exist without any logical basis or foundation. The fakes are completely controlled by them, and they will never see beyond them. To not be controlled by them one must do more then just realize that they exist. One must resist any ideas that have no point, endlessly question, and never accept imperfection or compromise in any answer."

R. and J. left me with a host of keywords, which, they assured me, could be combined in Google by the non-fake in order to find them, so that the forces could be joined for the battle. Among the words are defiance, dream, logical, fury, and perfection. Googling the whole set doesn't lead to the boys, but it gives a view of how large their spam campaign was.

One wonders what Ry and the Jakester would have to say to the U.S. Congressmen objecting to an HIV+ character on Sesame Street. Apparently our representatives are concerned that because the South African version of the show is going to address their devastating health crisis, our response should be to worry if American kids are too fragile. I honestly don't know what our young iconoclasts would think -- their lofty relationship to humankind doesn't leave me much room to speculate. But I'm pretty certain I know how this is likely to play out in The Leftersons.

Finally, speaking of lofty evaluations of humankind, the rib-tickling Martin Amis was up to his usual good-natured antics in the Guardian last month, in an article reprinted in the current issue of Harper's, which accounts for my lateness in seeing it. If you haven't already, you must check out this classic little collection of corkers like "Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful." That's what you have to love about Amis -- he's always got a line like that to give you a little lift on a weary day.