One Lawrence Barrett– Time magazine’s senior editor who blew the whistle on Carter’s purloined briefing papers in his book on Reagan and whom Parade, the lowbrow Sunday gossip magazine, calls “distinguished,” “knowledgeable,” and “insightful”–bares his mental acumen for the aforementioned sheet in an interview about the President:

[He is] often too rigid for his own good and the country’s good …

How does Mr. Barrett know so objectively and unequivocally what is the “country’s good”? The mightiest of intellects among scholars, statesmen, and politicians have endless doubts about their knowledge of such an abstruse and complex matter, and they deeply differ on it. For Mr. Barrett there are no mysteries involved; he  has an  answer with the snap of his fingers. If we wanted to pass judgments by snapping out ready­to-wear answers, we would have said that what Mr. Barrett knows and puts into books or articles is pure trash. Is this correct?
 
Which, in turn, brings us to what beyond any reasonable doubt is trash, weekly disseminated by one Cheryl Lavin of the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine. Ms. Lavin interviews celebrities and demicelebrities. Not long ago she featured one Nora Harlow, a journalist specializing in sex therapy. Her included picture reveals Ms. Harlow as a young, wholesome-looking woman with an extraordinary amount of idiocy emanating from her eyes. Ms. Lavin asks a question of stupendous stupidity:

Lack of desire–isn’t that a new sex problem?

And Ms: Harlow delivers an answer which is sui generis a masterpiece and monu• ment of imbecility:

Absolutely. It’s so new that some physicians don’t even know about it. But sex therapists now know why couples who are together a long time lose their desire. It’s a biological trick. Couples think it’s natural. ‘We’ve known each other so long there’s no more magic.’ That’s not it. It’s that they just don’t take the time to do all the things that once turned them on. Actually, anyone with a sex problem has a desire problem. But there are solutions. These are what I mean by secrets of sex therapy.

Kamasutra was completed sometime around 400 B.C. and is probably one of the latecomers in mankind’s knowledge about the lack of desire–which Ms. Harlow deems an “absolutely … new sex problem.” Has it ever occurred to her that the current dilemma of spreading sexual apathy may have something to do with the proliferation of half-educated propagandists for sleaze sex therapy like herself?