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        Volume CCXXXIV, Number 45                    May, 2004              

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Those under the age of 40 may find this hard to believe, but once upon a time, before Anna Quindlen became Everywoman, she used to be readable. In her youth, she was able to rise from her chaise and carry on the trade known as "reporting," and the results were pretty good. Even after she ascended to the role of Generational Wise Woman, she was able to raise a smile with reminiscences about the time her goo-slathered diaphragm sprung from between her fingers, out the window of her Barnard dorm and onto 116th St. Pretty amusing unless it landed on your ice-cream cone.

But those days are long over. As the Emily Dickinson of Hoboken, she has plenty of time to muse about Her Wonderful Husband, Her Wonderful Children and how wonderful it is to have to time to reflect on all this wonderfulness while hubby is out of the house earning the dough required to support her muse.

We suppose the she has the right to recycle her columns and laundry lists into a royalty-generating vehicle, but if she doesn't watch herself, this once talented writer will find herself transformed into an Irish Oprah Winfrey. Like the arc described by her undergraduate contraceptive device, that's a long gooey fall.

In a companion volume to George W. Bush's How to be a Great President, overleveraged and overcombed reality TV star Donald Trump is pleased to share with us his secrets for getting rich. Rule One of course is to inherit a tidy little real estate empire from dad. If you're Eliot Spitzer, you stop there.

Rule 2 is to build your temples to vanity with other people's money. If they don't generate enough cash to pay the quasi-usorious interest rates required to peddle the junk, you don't have to pay. The bondholders take the haircut and you keep the combover. Repeat as many times as necessary.

Rule 3 is the one that The Donald borrowed from those small-time crumbs who take out newspaper ads promising the secret of wealth to for 10 bucks. For the ten spot, they send you a piece of paper that says: "Take out a newspaper ad promising the secret of wealth for 10 bucks." There's no better way to get rich than to con suckers into paying you as much as $21.95 for vapid advice. We bet that The Donald doesn't even tell his marks to buy a red fright wig and write a book entitled "How to be Rich."

Nothing like a little feel-good reading for these warm days. Of course, this gore- and hate-filled rant feels good only if you believe that the United Nations is a satanic plot to take guns away from good white Christian men and that Israelis are useful if damned instruments of God's will as long as they help accelerate the evangelical wet dream of Armageddon.

Although some of the high points of the Book of Revelations, such as the 144,000 singing virgins of Chapter 14:3-4, unaccountably don't appear in this volume, we're sure that readers can enjoy the Rapture: the time when the heads of good Christians pop off orgasmically while the rest of us burn in the fires of hell, or, as it is sometimes referred to, Los Angeles.

It is wonderful, in the literal spiritual sense, that the New and Old Testaments constitute irrefutable support for the reactionary social and foreign policies of today's Republican right (itself a pleonasm). But when you peel off the xenophobia and sanctimoniousness of this screed and countless similar tomes, their lurid tales of blood and fire and suffering in the Middle East remind us uncomfortably of the latest news from Babylon, uh, Iraq.