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A spokesman for Channel 4 said the repeat went out later than the original programme, at 10pm rather than 9pm, and it had been thought that the audience at the later time would not be offended.

The assumption being that we (Christians) -- being such hopelessly unhip, boring, conservative squares -- go to bed at 8:30 pm or so. You know, right after we wind the clock and drink a nice glass of warm milk...

Yet, how many yearly reports do we see, in which Follywood is taken to task for lack of minority advancement? How many billions do they rake in, that don't go to help the homeless? How many could have built children's hospitals for the same amount of money they just spent on their sixth wedding?

Don't you just love it when the most dysfunctional collection of human beings on this entire planet purports to tell others how to live?

The past 40 years of political and cultural history have been an almost complete fraud. Pop-culture, culture itself in the age of saturation media, is all about selling ads.

In the early 1960s, Doyle-Dane-Bernbach, among others, discovered an unbeatable gimmick for doing this; the trappings and superficial appearance of rebellion and non-conformity. Since this is actually a type of conformity itself (as many have noted) the idea is not to encourage real non-conformity but a comfortably marketable and carefully focused illusion of it.

Often as not, the object of this pseudo-rebellion is a strawman, a pop-culture caricature of some alleged oppression rather than the thing itself. This is the real origin of pop-culture's contempt for Christianity. It is the historic majority religion and a natural subject of rebellion for the simple-minded, the impressionable, and the emotionally needy; that is, the most rigid of pop-culture conformists.

Islam, on the other hand, is exotic and relatively unfamiliar to this audience, and has the additional cachet provided by an aura of menace and violence.

That it is one of the most rigid systems ever devised does not matter to those who need not live under it. Promoting it is superficially rebellious and outrageous, and therefore indispensable to those for whom pop-culture conformity is a religion in and of itself.

The Conquest of Cool by Thomas M. Frank documents and analyzes the relationships among advertising, pop-culture, and radical politics. It is a devastating indictment and quite possibly the most important book of the past 10 years. It was written before 9-11, but later events have only multiplied the urgency and relevance of its message.