DISPATCHES FROM THE CULTURE WARS. Drew Patterson in L.A. alerted me to this attack on Glee by an admitted fan of Glee, California Family Council CEO Ron Prentice, who hath repented.

I fell prey to temptation. My ears were being tickled. But I have corrected my path!

Last night, I watched Glee for the last time. A television show about a group of high school students in their school’s musical performing club, their teacher (Will Schuster), and other faculty members of the school, Glee has devolved into a worldview-training course. And its worldview is without hope.

Devolved? You mean it started out like Seventh Heaven with pop and show tunes? Prentice would have you believe so:

Standard to the majority of television series, the first season impresses viewers with good story lines, and in this case, exceptional musical talent. Then, more overt worldview messages enter into the scripts.

Apparently Glee caught this Christer with Grease, Les Miserables, and Madonna sing-alongs, and then to Prentice's shock it suddenly turned out to be full of homosexuals and teen couplings. It has to be a conspiracy!

My guess is, other members of the council walked in on Prentice dancing around the TV to "Sweet Transvestite" and singing into a hairbrush, and he had to come up with something.

Speaking of O Jesus, The Anchoress finds "Another Reason to Defund PBS": The Sesame Street parody of Mad Men.

Mad men, sad men and … happy men?

Is it too difficult for Sesame Street to teach the concept of gladness? While watching this video, everything in me was screaming, “glad! GLAD! You’re GLAD MEN!”

They missed an opportunity to make education dynamic: “This makes me happy! This makes me GLAD!”

Of course if they had, she'd be yelling about this.

Add “glad” and you’ve given the children the concept of a synonym, plus a fun rhyme, and you’ve added a little wordplay for the adults.

Instead, this is dumbed-down, and maddeningly less than it could be...

A rightwing fake nun watching children's television has no right to complain about anyone or anything else being dumbed down.

But let's not just pick on the Jesus people when there are plenty of quasi-secular conservative intellectuals to pick on. In this regard, National Review's Phi Beta Cons blog is a treasure trove. Carol Iannone reads Antonia Fraser's account of her mostly happy life with the late Harold Pinter, which fills Iannone with literally incoherent rage:

Ha ha, but the laugh is on us. So while Pinter was enjoying his high-level marriage of refined intellectual equals in the British upper class, he was inflicting on his servile public a dark vision of obscure miseries, casual cruelties, inarticulate vulgarity, strangled miscommunications, and menacing silences in sordid rooming houses.

Also, centuries earlier, Shakespeare wrote tragedies and then went out to pubs and told jokes. And wrote comedies! Later, Inannone follows up:

A reader wants to know my point in my Pinter post.

You could go read it, but it doesn't get any funnier than that opening.