Back during the Depression, Americans used to tune in to the radio and listen to escapist entertainment like, say, Little Orphan Annie and The Shadow. These radio serials created alternate universes, dreams spun of gossamer, that could divert us from the hardship of the real world.

In the midst of our own economic collapse, similarly, we have former Senator Rick Santorum's column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. And today brings us another gripping installment of Santorum's craziness.

This time, Santorum spins a familiar fable about how America is a "center-right" country. The evidence for this, I guess, is the massive ass-whooping Democrats put on the GOP a couple weeks ago. Santorum, of course, has an explanation for that: 

Our governing philosophy was not rejected in the last two elections; rather, we could not plausibly explain how our ideas and actions matched that philosophy.

This is of course the story a lot of Republicans have been telling themselves as they clutch the pillow over their heads. "It's not our actions and policies people have rejected -- we just didn't do a good enough job of bullshitting them."

So after eight years of right-wing ideology, Santorum contends, voters rejected Republicans because the GOP wasn't ideological enough.  The party's

problem continues today, as the government considers whether to borrow and print more money to bail out the Big Three auto manufacturers, which are even less worthy of a bailout than the financial sector.

A couple things are worth noting here. First off, let's recall -- again -- that if Rick Santorum had had his way, that financial sector would have frittered away much of our Social Security funds, along with our 401(k)s. 

But more importantly, this just shows how crazy any Republican would be to listen to Rick Santorum. The auto companies -- and the millions of working-class families they support -- are less worthy of support than financial secort? Really? In whose book? Where are all the voters who want to help the Lords of Wall Street, but not the Ford employees of Lordstown, Ohio? In what universe are people more sympathetic to Daddy Warbucks than to Annie herself? 

Delusions like these are the reason Santorum is freelancing for pocket change, while less blinkered Republicans, like local Congressman Tim Murphy, are still drawing a federal paycheck.

Murphy, as you may know, voted for the auto bailout but against bailing out the financial sector. In other words, his preferences were exactly the opposite of those Santorum recommends. 

Now you could argue that Murphy was just playing politics here -- opposing a massively unpopular banking-industry bailout shortly before an election. And then he voted for a measure to benefit an industry that the working folks in his district feel they have a stake in. But if Murphy was just playing politics ... doesn't that prove something?

Murphy's an ideologue, but unlike Santorum, he doesn't assume that the voters are. He may be a weasel, and Democrats like me might dearly love to get rid of him, but that's not the issue here. The issue is that Murphy, whatever his faults, has maintained some sort of connection with political reality -- which is to say he has maintained some sort of connection with the people he represents. His continuing political success puts paid to Santorum's bizarre notion that, in the midst of an economic collapse, what people really want is a purer form of the ideology that caused the crisis in the first place.

But by all means, I invite GOP operatives to continue tuning into Santorum's messages. In a future episode, perhaps he'll be able to explain the setbacks of 2010 and 2012. 

A friend just passed this installment of NPR's "Planet Money" to me. First broadcast last week, it features historian John Steele Gordon talking about how Pittsburgh's steel industry was apparently NOT too big to fail (The segment starts at roughly the 5-minute mark.) As Gordon points out, when the collapse of American steel was at hand, manufacturers didn't jet off to Washington to get a massive federal cash infusion, the way automakers have been doing. They mostly sought tariffs and other trade sanctions against foreign producers instead. 

You could argue that this is a distinction without a difference: If Detroit gets its bailout, it will be underwritten by taxpayers ... whereas the burden from tariffs was passed along to the customers having to pay for domestic steel. In either case, the industry's problems are being put on someone else's shoulders.

Then again, Gordon notes that much of steel's competition came from Japan, which rebuilt its industrial base from scratch after World War II, using more up-to-date equipment. And of course, Japan was able to do that thanks in part to help from the US government. So perhaps asking the government to protect its own industries wasn't so outlandish.

But maybe the big difference between cars and steel is the timing. Since the time since steel collapsed, we saw the rise of Reagan and three Bush terms, interrupted by a two-term Democratic presidency which believed strongly in free trade and financial deregulation. But after nearly 30 years of touting the virtues of the free-market -- mostly under Republican rule -- the government is considering levels of intervention that weren't even contemplated when steel went under.

Maybe excessive amounts of deregulation lead to excessive bailouts when it all goes awry? Maybe this money isn't intended to bail-out not the decades-old screw-ups of Detroit, but the decades-old screw-ups of Washington D.C.?

Incidentally, following the Gordon interview is a 5-minute rebroadcast of a "Planet Money" segment from the year before, in which correspondent Adam Davidson visits Pittsburgh to see what the decline of steel hath wrought. It's a surprisingly nuanced piece that notes steel's collapse wasn't quite as complete as popular myth would have it.  And it explores, somewhat superficially, the slur "cake-eater," which is one of those insults I keep meaning to use more often in columns. 

Finally, in a "these are industries that died" vein, I recommend Jason Togyer's post on the Post-Gazette's recent layoffs ... and its poorly timed price hike a couple days later. (Seriously -- did these guys get their marketing strategy from the people who advise the Pirates?) Jason's argument is that in the face of serious challenges, our local papers have often focused most on the stuff they are least equipped to provide -- like providing gossip or world news people already have caught on CNN.

That criticism dovetails with one Jason's former colleague, Dave Copeland, made in CP a few years back--

[T]he office drones we were targeting wouldn't pick up a newspaper if it just had stories they'd already read on the Internet when their boss wasn't looking. What the paper needed, I argued, was content that people couldn't get anywhere else.

-- and about the only place where I disagree with Jason is his denunciation of the P-G's comics page. Sure, features like "Rex Morgan" and "Family Circus" are every bit as awful as he says. I can't imagine anyone under the age of 60 ever reads such tripe. But then again ... guess which demographic increasingly makes up the print edition's bread-and-butter? Hard to blame a paper for trying to protect the readers it still has. 

OK, let's just stipulate that everything we see on NBC's new 10 p.m.-hole filler Momma's Boys is true. My gut says no, and even my mind smells way too much set-up and too many too-perfect lines, but for the sake of argument -- and entertainment -- let's buy in.

Momma's Boys -- in case you're too good for the worst sort of TV -- is a dating reality show, yet another iteration on The Bachelor. This show's gimmick is simple: three eligible bachelors interact with 32 hand-chosen prospects with their mothers in tow. The men (or should I say, "men"?) live off-site but the moms bunk down with their potential daughters-in-law.

It's a show designed to elicit the most basic form of satisfaction: Am I ever better than these people!

Start with the "dreamy" bachelors. They're of reasonable handsomeness, and are gainfully employed. So why do they still live at home with mom, in bland suburban bedrooms with baseballs hats for décor? Most people would say because they're lazy, immature, scared, too attached to mom, spoiled, functionless and so on. Employed guys in the mid-20s that live with mom: Big Red Flag. Besides the aforementioned flaws, at best, you're gonna hook a guy who expects his betrothed to replace mom, who seem defined here as an unconditionally adoring, full-time housekeepers.

The gals -- who can seriously keep track of 32, half of whom seem to be the exact same trashy-looking bleached blonde? -- are a purposefully mixed lot. They are a variety of ethnicities; heights; weights (though as far as I could see this equaled one girl that was extra bony and one girl that was extra fleshy); personalities (you got giggly, outspoken, teary, bitchy); and occupations. Some seemed "ideal" given our preconception of good wife material -- school teachers and nurses; others, well, let's be honest: Only the producer of a low-rent TV reality show would stack the deck with not one, but two, nude models. (One posed for Playboy, the other for Penthouse -- and discussions of distinction are occurring all over America now.)

The inevitable spatting between the girls hasn't kicked in yet, I'm guessing, because for the first episode, the men were mostly absent, and thus: who to fight over? There was one mini-meltdown, the sort of thing that gives all women a bad name -- one girl cried when the heel of her shoe broke, and another girl yelled at her for crying, causing, naturally, more tears.

And then, there are the moms, the enablers of these pathetic man-child situations. ("I can't help it" was their common refrain, explaining their "devotion" and the buying of their sons' underpants. Uh, yes, you can.) The show offers three distinct archetypes: "fun" buddy-mom; smothering Jewish mom; and hot-headed racist mom.

The last mom -- a Catholic of Iraqi background with a Polish surname from the greater Detroit area -- in her introductory video gave an impassioned defense that her son needed to marry a white girl. No blacks, no Asians, no Jews, no non-Catholics, no Muslims, no gals from divorced families, no "fat butts" -- in sum, "no mixing."

Imagine the "fun" when the 32 girls watched this tape. (NBC sure isn't afraid to disregard the new warm-and-fuzzy, post-racial, post-election vibe and purposefully stir the pot with decades-old race-baiting gimmicks. For entertainment.

To their credit -- or per the producers' instructions -- the girls were properly outraged. One girl commented later than the racist mom was so awful that "even the dumb girls" were upset by her.

Of course, all this was prelude to the first water-cooler-ready act of the episode, when racist mom came to the house. After seeing the tape, some of the not-white girls had formulated a stealth plan, whereby they would be sweet-as-pie to mom, but then to get revenge, would mack hard on her son.

But this quickly crumbled when a cuss-filled screaming match broke out between one of the black contestants and racist mom (who despite her long laundry list of 1950s-era qualifications for a perfect daughter-in-law seemed quite comfortable shrieking her own f-bombs at strangers and on TV). All very expected -- you could probably write most of the back-and-forth screaming yourself -- girl demands apology, mom avers she isn't racist.

But, this shameful scene (I can't look away!) did deliver the show's first great take-away line, when racist mom, trying to prove she had much love in her heart for black people, hollered by way of defense: "I know half the Detroit Lions!"

The venerable science culture rag Seed reports that science has once again confirmed something we already knew. In this case, that bands generally get big locally before they hit the national spotlight.

Rather than just common sense, the study being describe employed the scientific method, of course. Essentially the scientists analyzed peer-to-peer sharing via computer networks to gauge an artist's popularity in her immediate geographic area and on a national scale.

What's obviously kind of funny to those of us who pay attention to music is that the article implies that this is an important social-scientific advancement -- empirical evidence supporting a theory of networked publics that can ostensibly "predict" when an artist will hit the national circuit. In fact, of course, it's always been widely held that the best way for a band to make the big time is to work hard and establish an audience, then tour. That's precisely how we've we've always predicted these things.

(Of course, there are exceptions: witness Black Moth "Opposite of a Scene" Super Rainbow largely surpassing the local circuit to hit it big in the indie world last year, or, conversely, The Clarks, perennial winners of CP's "Best Of" poll, who in 15 years have barely poked into the national spotlight a few times.)

Here's what's truly interesting, though: while we've all known for ages that playing local shows is the best way to build a fan base, it's notable that in the age of p2p sharing and instant accessibility, that's still the case, and even an analysis of web consumption supports it.

In many ways, the growth of internet communities has the perceived effect of decreasing the importance of location; people can communicate and send music and other content over vast distances just as quickly as they can with people down the street.

Folks like Paul Virilio have posited that the growth of cyberspace and worldwide real-time communication are destroying locational "place" as a concept -- information has essentially sped up to a pace that our physical bodies can't keep up with, and so in a sense location no longer matters.

The results of this study resist that sort of conclusion -- or at least resist the idea that we've already reached that stage. There are factors besides simply the speed of transmission that determine whether people are listening to and sharing music. There's something about local artists that still means something, even though their music is basically no easier to come by than a band from another hemisphere.

To contextualize a little, the lesson local musicians can take away from this is: use the internet for promotion, but don't assume that you can bypass the leg work that your predecessors went through. While your music will be passed around via filesharing, the people closest to you are still your best bet where word-of-mouth promotion is concerned. That shitty opener spot at that Howler's show is still just as important as Sendspacing your album to folks in Moscow.

I suppose everyone's prone to nostalgia. Even the wonderful oddballs, misfits and other creative types who wandered the South Side back in the mid-'90s, when freaks and artists could still afford to live there. The scene had a mini but cause-driven reunion this past Sunday at the Lava Lounge, to raise medical funds for Olivia Kissel of Zafira belly-dance troupe.

Back in the day, of course, the Lava Lounge itself was still new, but co-owner Scott Kramer's Beehive coffeehouse was ground zero for the subculture. Kramer himself was among those who congregated anew on Sunday, in the immediate wake of the Steelers' last-minute win. The MC was Phat Man Dee, who came of artistic age on the South Side in the '90s. And indeed, along with bellydancing by Zafira's Christine Hamer and Maria Hamer, some fire-eating by Lady J, and a little neo-cabaret singing from PMD herself, we got the latest incarnations of two of her erstwhile compadres in the Bull Seal! Collective, the splendidly strange performance group.

Liz Hammond (a.k.a. Ukulizzy) performed on four strings. (Her partner, Buddy Nutt, who accompanied PMD on his singing saw, was one person who hadn't yet come to town way back when.) "Pain-proof clown" Andrew the Impaled changed from street duds into leather harness and jester's cap to driven a ten-penny nail up his nose, then a screwdriver. Maybe best of all, though, was seeing Big Daddy Bull Seal. The singer, prop-maker and indefatigably mustachioed caper-cutter -- a sort of cross between Rufus T. Firefly and Captain Beefheart -- was back in town for the first time in four years, resplendent in vertically striped knickers, red plaid smoking jacket and bird's nest of bright orange hair. He and his lovely and talented "persistent," Sabrina, were visiting from Santa Fe, N.M., where they're making a living making puppets (some of which get shown in art galleries), and it was great to hear him recite one of his Beat-style poems to her violin accompaniment.

By 9:30, the place was packed, and they must have made some money for Ms. Kissel. Near the evening's close, Phat Man Dee noted how many of the night's performers -- herself included -- had once worked at janitors at either the Beehive, the Lava Lounge, or both. It was an amusing note to end on, with just the right touch of grubbiness.

I always feel like I'm getting away with something when I see a movie at the Maxi-Saver 12, out at Century Square Plaza. Weekday tickets are just 99 cents for movies that debuted as recently as a few months ago. This West Mifflin multiplex is the only real second-run bargain place around, and frankly I wonder how they can make any money, especially with DVDs seeming to hit stores just weeks after the films ends their first runs. But the Maxi-Saver (part of the Carmike Cinema chain) has been doing it for years.

The Dark Knight (itself DVD'd this week) is the second of British director Christopher Nolan's contributions to the Batman series. I first became aware of Nolan a decade ago, with his intelligent, provocative little psychological thriller called Following. These days, he's surely one of the few directors making big-budget superhero movies with high artistic purpose. His first Batman effort, Batman Begins, was broadly about the difference between justice and vengeance; Dark Knight is even more complex, with Batman's battle against the Joker the morally fraught vortex of a society consumed by its own fear and violence.

That society, clearly, is ours -- the futuristic Batmobile aside, the film's sets are unstylized -- and it's portrayed as an armed madhouse: Batman's vigilante crime-fighting has inspired useless imitators, while the real thing's effectiveness merely causes Gotham's gangs to escalate by hiring a pure psychopath, disguised in evil-clown makeup. Rather than targeting Batman (Christian Bale) directly, the Joker (the electrifying Heath Ledger) simply goes terrorist, and vows to keep killing until Batman reveals his true identity. Batman, meanwhile, resorts to torture; an upright DA is driven criminally insane; anarchic terrorists masquerade as cops; and cops are put in harm's way when they're forcibly disguised as terrorists.

Throw in some high-tech surveillance and the post-9/11, War on Terror, Iraq War echoes are everywhere. (Batman even stands on the smoking ruins of a bombed building.) Eventually, less-bad things happen -- Batman again refuses to kill for vengeance, for instance -- but the film, far from the usual upbeat hero walk-off, wraps on dark, unresolved notes. (It's much more Seven Samurai, in that way, than Superman.) Interestingly, the most hopeful plot line in the film revolves around a sort of prisoners'-dilemma scenario devised by the Joker, which ends with two boatloads of civilians -- one of commuters, one of orange-jumpsuited convicts -- refusing to blow up the other to save themselves.

One criticism of the Maxi-Saver: due to either a poor sound system or someone's overenthusiasm with the volume knob, the film's dialogue was often was often as murky as its maze-like narrative. But what do you want for 99 cents?

When I first starting watching modern dance, about 15 years ago, probably the biggest challenge was overcoming my urge to narratize: "Oh, she's pirouetting ... that's means she's, um, confused about her relationship to the guy." After a while, you realize this viewing strategy is kind of dumb, and you look for other ways to appreciate the performance (beyond, of course, the sheer pleasure of watching highly trained bodies in precise and purposeful motion, which on a certain level isn't much different from grooving on a well-executed screen pass in football).

Dance Alloy Theater's recent show (Dec. 5-8) was unusual in that it offered a highly narrative performance along with a more typically expressionistic piece. New York-based choreographer Marina Harris's "Three Camilles" (a world premiere) retold the classic tragic love triangle in pretty linear fashion. The opening sequence, with one Camille (Adrienne Misko) draped in a cylinder of gossamer white fabric and contended for by her suitors (Christopher Bandy as the rich boy, Michael Walsh as the artist) was wonderfully sensual. There was also a good bit of humor -- at least early one -- as when the other two Camilles (Stephanie Dumaine and Maribeth Maxa) joined the first in using their hoop skirts as percussion instruments and mock weaponry. The 40-minute piece was satisfying in its own terms, but knowing where it would go narratively -- where it had to go --took some of the sense of discovery out of watching it.

But maybe that reaction only means I've grown conditioned to more nonlinear stuff like the second part of the program, "Schakt" (Swedish for "shaft"). The 1983 work is one of Alloy artistic and executive director Beth Corning's touchstones; she knew its choreographer, the late Per Jonsson, and the Alloy performed the piece previously during her tenure. (Corning, in fact, says her troupe is the only North American theater company with the rights to "Schakt," which was staged by Per Sacklén.)

It's a striking piece indeed, and literally: It opens with three dancers, each set in his or her own shaft of light, wielding a long-handled mallet to strike a huge, vertically suspended and artfully oxidized rectangle of steel sheeting. Accompanied by dire, bass-and-drone-heavy music, the dancers (Bandy, Maxa and Walsh) commence three parallel -- but often overlapping -- psychodramas of fear and trembling, their bodies evoking isolation, dread, debilitation. Aside from knowing it would have a beginning, middle and end, there was no telling where "Schakt" would go from moment to moment, and it was all the more potent for it.

Heads up, mopers: local promoter Joker Productions just announced that on March 17, the long-absent-from-our-area legend himself, Morrissey, will be appearing at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. Tickets go on sale through Ticketmaster on December 19, and they range from $35 to $45. Get on it, suedeheads!

Every good work of art is about more than one thing, but Albee's infamous The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is harder to get a bead on than most. The very premise is disorienting: This is a play, which debuted in 2002, about a man who falls in love with livestock, and it's not a farce. It is, however, darkly, darkly funny. And one way I've been thinking about it since seeing it this past weekend disturbs me particularly: The Goat explores how far a man will go to preserve the sense that he is Innocent.

By "innocent," I don't mean "not guilty." Albee's protagonist, a successful and happily married architect named Martin, technically admits his four-legged infidelity in scene one, and though he's keen to keep it a secret from his wife, Stevie, he never denies it. The virtuosic heart of the play -- it must consume a full third of the 110 intermissionless minutes -- is Martin's confrontation with Stevie after the truth is revealed.

Nobody writes arguments like the creator of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and this one, between two exceptionally smart characters played by two exceptional actors, rivets. ("I wish you were stupid," says Stevie at one point, and Martin returns the heart-crushing compliment.) Stephanie Mayer Staley's set -- the cinderblock-wall and the family's push-button lighting grid surrounding the artworks, the Lucite architect's models -- is a bunker full of fragility. Robin Walsh's turn as Stevie, alight with irony and betrayal, is at times nearly too painful to watch. 

But it's Martin, beautifully played by Tony Bingham, who haunts me most. He is Albee's Good Liberal, for all the right things: tolerance (though struggling with his son's homosexuality); the future (he's designing a "City of Tomorrow," or some such). Though he's always correcting people's language ("the goat whom you've been fucking"), he is nothing if not empathetic. One sequence of his argument with Stevie involves Martin's story about a bestiality therapy group he attended, the point of which story is to explain away people's intercourse with pigs (the man had done it since he was a farmboy) and geese (the man was very ugly) and German Shepherds (the woman had been repeatedly raped as a child).

When I interviewd director Rodger D. Henderson for a preview piece on the show, he emphasized the theme of whether our lives are about what we do, or what's it's thought that we do. It's a significant question in the play, but I'm more struck by Albee's emphasis on it being Martin's 50^th birthday; his forgetfulness; his childlike wonder in relating how he felt when he was with the goat; and even his repeated insistence that never once before, in more than two decades of marriage, had he even considered being unfaithful to Stevie. Wide-eyed and distracted, as Bingham plays him, he seems to argue that because his heart intended no malice -- was innocent -- he couldn't commit any. And that having an affair with a goat was right (or at least not wrong) because it felt right.

OK, Albee seems to be asking -- of his characters, himself, his audience -- what's not all right with you? What can't you justify to yourselves?

(The Goat continues at the Rep through Sun., Dec. 14.)

Is there a recreational way to teach how ecosystems work? The destructive and wasteful "economies" we're always propping up with bail-outs and interest-rate cuts are man-made, but it's still air, water, soil and sunlight, and the plants and animals they support, that ultimately keep us alive. Our failure to understand natural systems is a kind of cultural illness, but zoos might be a good venue for applying a remedy.

In my first visit there in a couple years, on Thanksgiving weekend, I petted a ray (the fish, dog-like, seemed to enjoy it) and got my first glimpse of seadragons -- fantastic sea-horse relatives that resemble elegantly floating sprigs of seaweed. And I felt my inevitable ambivalence about cooping close human relatives like orangs and gorillas in boxes. But mostly, I wondered how the zoo might help visitors understand how nature uses all its resources, recycling endlessly to keep things in balance.

Of course, this is inherently difficult for zoos: Animals who mixed there as in the wild would dampen revenue by eating each other, for one thing. And while the synthetic flooring, "foliage" and swimming pools that frame most exhibits are easy to maintain, they give scant sense of how, for instance, a forest processes rainwater.

Granted, displays like the one at the tiger exhibit have long noted how habitat destruction threatens animals with extinction. And there's an old monkey-house display that warns of the consequences of bulldozing rainforests for ranches and farms (even though, when I visited, the display's digital lost-acreage ticker -- perhaps exhausted from the effort -- had stopped counting.)

Some newer displays showed more promise. For instance, the aquarium, in collaboration with groups like The Seahorse Project, bore a detailed sign about global overfishing of the oceans and -- rather remarkably -- basically told people not to eat most shrimp (it's harvested unsustainably) and to lobby government for marine parks, to preserve habitat. Meanwhile, the updated polar bear exhibit offered pamphlets pushing ocean-friendly fish consumption; a sign explaining how petrochemicals like PCBs enter the food web and accumulate in predators like polar bears ... and people; and displays about how emissions from our fossil-fuel consumption is dooming polar bears through climate change.

There's a lot more to be done, and schools, of course, must do the lion's share. But in some ways, zoos, as places of fun, can probably instruct more effectively. If delightful sights -- baby elephants wrasslin' each other; penguins torpedoing through the water in the perpetual dark of a simulated Antarctic winter -- can make us empathize with individual species, they ought to be an inroad for teaching about the whole web of life, too. Even today, and even when they emphasize saving species and habitats, zoos seldom say why those things are more than exercises in sentiment, or asthetics. Too seldom do they tell us that the tigers, polar bears and seahorses are canaries in the coal mine -- and that we live in the same mine.