Not So Rich

Last spring, Frank Rich screened "Kinsey" and found it "an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American history."

Now he finds the film more timely. Indeed, his column in yesterday's New York Times held up "Kinsey" as the harbinger of a returning dark age, as religious conservatives hatch a new, post-electoral "plot against sex in America."

Golly, when I heard that "Kinsey" was attracting the usual spitballs from the usual suspects, I just took it as another skirmish in the Thirty Years War between publicity-seeking preachers and keister-covering broadcasters. To judge by Rich's account, though, the situation is more serious than that. Indeed, the battlements of sexual enlightenment are being stormed by an army of Bible-reading Orcs.

This is odd, given that only last week Rich was reassuring us that red-state couch potatoes enjoy televised T&A just as much as blue-state ones do. That struck me as a singularly uninteresting observation, but about all we can expect from a critic who (to paraphrase Charles Peguy) would go to any length to avoid being thought a prude.

Still, I can't help but wonder whether Rich is really worried about the end of nonmarital nooky as we know it, or whether he's just running short of ideas. To quote Peguy directly: "A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."