There was something in the New York Times story "Actors in All-Latino Cast Savor a 'Historic Moment'" that reminded me of the BBC story "Gloucester Muslims tell (British Home Secretary) Blunkett to resign" — but what? That is, how could it be that a story written to celebrate, politically and correctly, the Hispanic-ness of a Broadway cast have anything to do with a heated gathering of British Muslims at a Gloucester community center? What could acting in "Anna in the Tropics," a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, have to do with debating the arrest of a local bloke suspected of Al Qaeda links? The stories are without parallels.


Or are they? Both stories are deeply marked by their subjects' ethno-vision, the tightly blinkered perspective that makes for rigid groupthink and cumbersome apologetics. On Broadway, it allows actors, who are as lucky as they are deserving, to rise to the peak of their careers and see only a view dominated by the bogeymen of identity politics."

It does indeed seem that people are being lost in the sort of new world that we are entering. Truly a gnostic endeavor we have undertaken.