"Be cool, stay in school." Perhaps posters are still put up with this wording; when I was still watching Conan O'Brien's show he would lead off segments based on twisting sayings with that as an example. I suppose it is common enough, which could translate to bland enough. For your scribe it's a metaphor for cognitive dissonance. The poor commoners are urged to follow this advice. But does one ever hear the big man on campus, or sorority Suzy or Cindy "soc" utter this? No, they are too hip for the room and the "rabble".

I recall seeing Catholic moms, including a family member, fresh from physically disciplining a child for certain language and/or back talk, chatting up friends about who was committing adultery with whom on "Dallas" and other prime time shows. Back in the 60's we parochial students were marched off to the auditorium to view tape-to-film transcriptions of the Paulist Fathers' "Insight". This was rather sneered at by the students---such a musty, dare we say "Byzantine" (okay, I know that word) crawl through a half hour---while the teachers and clergy berated us the show was better than what was generally on and we ought to acknowledge that.

Two or three decades ago I was "batch taping" our Channel 7 when it wasn't on the network grid after midnight on Saturdays. In other words, using the slow speed, sometimes know as three to one, to catch their dodgy times for showing old Republic serials in the times before 'on demand'. Here was "Insight" also, apparently packaged for a newer time with "TV G" applied over the openings. And I watched; they were better than Commando Cody, anyway.

One of my favorite L.A. Times critics was television scribe Howard Rosenberg. During his tenure he revealed himself here and there as secular. That generally known, in one column he marveled how Insight's now departed producer, Father Elwood Kaiser, did interesting things with shoe string and bottle cap budgets. And again came a phrase about this show deserving more attention. How about that?

Sometimes Father had to choose between my two jokey budget items, but he also had gratis, as I recall, appearances by various thespians known to mainstream viewers. This was for 70's and 80's episodes which drew the sobriquet "The Catholic Twilight Zone" from IMDB contributors.

This blog was written after I was disturbed about something I heard on a Catholic radio station that's in my rotation as I nose around in Blue Bossa. The host, as he set off on the top of the hour, lionized the late Justice Scalia for his anti-abortion stance in an environment said host analogized to sewers. Wasn't Scalia also a champion for the rights of corporations and money, lots of money, over that of employee mothers? That is for another, maybe the next, blog provided I do not wait a whole season to write it.

I remember Father Kaiser's at times impish, though always inclusively so, intros and outros to the episodes. He had a non-judgmental eagerness to look at viewpoints at times quite opposed to his own. I remember this is I note the back and forth in these issues and in the sensation that one can feel so alone being an intellectual, a doubter, an outcast from those who feel one passes through something like a Catholic education to be able to shuck off the "square" stuff yet still excoriate the world for being so immoral. But then not alone among folks of integrity, belief or not.