Skipping Towards Gomorrah
Dan Savage
A fabulous idea for a book -- doing your best to cover all seven of the "Deadly Sins". And only in America is this possible (for which we should all be glad!).
Dan Savage, author of the brain-stunningly informative column "Savage Love", writes some of the best stories I've ever read about travels and social experiments. With an entire chapter devoted to each of the "Deadly Sins", Savage provides an in-depth, deliciously detailed description of his experiences and impressions. Yikes! ...and Wow! ...and Awesome! (think the "traditional" definition of "awesome", not the Valley Girl version).
And of course, to top the project off, a single weekend where he attempts to hit each sin -- bangety, bangety, bangety, bang!
The conclusion, of course, is reporting what America is, rather than what desperate moral crusaders shrilly insist it must be. America is a whacked-out, crazy, strange, bizarre playground of the mind and body for millions of hardworking people who for the most part take "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" as seriously as it ought to be taken.
Admittedly, he spends more time showing counter-examples to the wacky ideas proposed by Bill Bennett, Robert Bork, Pat Buchanan, Dr. Laura, and Bill O'Reilly (who has recently been accused of being too liberal for Fox) than I expected, but considering that the book is a response to Robert Bork's "Slouching Toward Gomorrah", this isn't too much of a surprise.
