Satan

The evil empire is back on the national stage. Nearly 30 years after President Reagan first spoke about the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," Rick Santorum brought it up Wednesday -- in apparent reference to a flurry of attention being given remarks he made four years ago about the devil. First, some background. In 2008, speaking to students at a Catholic school, Ave Maria University in Naples, Fla., Santorum spoke of a satanic assault on the United States. “The Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country -- the United States of America,” he said, according to a tape of the remarks on the university website.

The producers of History's enormous ratings hit "The Bible" may want to add a disclaimer to future episodes of the religious miniseries: Any resemblance between Satan and President Obama is purely coincidental. Given its subject matter, it was all but inevitable that "The Bible" would become a magnet for controversy, and so it has, though not for the reasons you might expect -- like, say, its emphasis on violence or its decidedly European-looking cast . No, the reason that executive producers Roma Downey and Mark Burnett found themselves on the defensive on Monday is that a  number of viewers, including conservative pundit Glenn Beck, have noticed a resemblance between Obama and Mohamen Mehdi Ouzaani, the actor who plays the Devil in the miniseries.

Kristine McKenna's commentary on the UCLA film series ("Pretty Women, Pretty Scary," Jan. 12) wonderfully illuminated many of our society's most regressive yet still deeply held beliefs about women. But I'd like to mention one point that may have been overlooked: The "Cat People" voice-over quoted refers to "an ancient race of people who fell away from Christianity and began to worship Satan . . . ." As writers as diverse as Ian Illich ("Gender") and Margaret Alice Murray ("The God of the Witches")

The evil empire is back on the national stage. Nearly 30 years after President Reagan first spoke about the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," Rick Santorum brought it up Wednesday -- in apparent reference to a flurry of attention being given remarks he made four years ago about the devil. First, some background. In 2008, speaking to students at a Catholic school, Ave Maria University in Naples, Fla., Santorum spoke of a satanic assault on the United States. “The Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country -- the United States of America,” he said, according to a tape of the remarks on the university website.

Doug Adrianson's comment that "Golf is a tool of Satan" ("Water-Hogging, Family-Busting and Other Golf Crimes," July 23), makes me practically positive that he must be a tool of Satan. Three of his points relate to his obvious obsession with social elitism. I guess he's never heard of public golf courses or the fact that one doesn't have to belong to any golf club to enjoy a game of golf. As to his point about wasting water, golf courses are not "water hogs." They are quiet green oases in the center of industry concrete, glass and steel.

About a quarter of Americans have a strong belief that Satan is real, and Mormons are most likely to accept that he is more than a mere symbol of evil, Barna Research Group reports. Researchers found that 27% of those polled strongly believe that Satan is real. Fifty-nine percent of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe Satan is real, while about one-fifth of Catholics, Episcopalians and Methodists think so.

Mission Viejo High School's grim-visaged devil logo upset enough parents in 1986 to spur school administrators to banish the scowling demon to mascot purgatory. Seven years later, after students settled on a bulldog for the school's emblem, the devil has resurfaced, creating controversy on campus.

In Arnold Schwarzenegger's new loud, goofy, roller-coaster ride of a movie, Satan shows himself to be such an incompetent boob that, if these truly are the last days, we at least know the devil isn't to blame. In "End of Days," Lucifer travels to Manhattan in search of his chosen bride but has a hard time finding her. (Neither he nor his minions think to check the phone book.) Then when he finally lays hands on her, he lets Schwarzenegger come and take her away. The problem may be that he's spreading himself too thin.

With the millennium upon us, God and Satan are scheduled for a battle royal, though we skeptics suspect that the winner will be the super-hero who can pull off the most successful vanishing act. So far it's a lopsided match. Evil is all the rage, and Good, the frail blessing of a decamped deity, is clearly in need of a new press agent. In magazines, on television, the radio and the Internet, pundits accustomed to the meaty certainties of politics and policy have been wrestling with imponderables, explicating Saint Augustine and "Pulp Fiction" to get at predestination and free will.

If you must have a shtick, make it a good one. Robert Olen Butler is familiar with this dictum: His collection "Tabloid Dreams" was based on supermarket tabloids; the stories in "Had a Good Time" were drawn from vintage postcards; "Severance" was composed of 240-word pieces about the dying thoughts of the decapitated; and last year's "Intercourse" imagined the inner monologues of 50 famous couples as they had sex. Butler's new novel, "Hell," is...

The records that brothers Ira and Charlie Louvin made in the 1950s and early '60s are some of the most revered and influential in the history of country music. The songs, many of them written by the Alabama-born siblings, have been widely recorded by succeeding generations of singers; their distinctive harmonies on songs such as "I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby," "When I Stop Dreaming," "If I Could Only Win Your Love," "Every Time You Leave" and "Don't Laugh" created a template that strongly affected groups from the Everly Brothers to the Beatles and the Byrds, to the Judds and forward to Lady Antebellum.

On the official crazy-time scale of Nicolas Cage onscreen craziness, "Drive Angry" rates at least a 7, maybe an 8. Directed by Patrick Lussier from a script by Lussier and Todd Farmer, the film could easily have rated higher but the filmmakers bog down their own nutty mayhem with much exposition, which has its own level of nuttiness. Cage's character is named John Milton ? get it? Like "Paradise Lost" John Milton? ? and that is in essence what passes for deeper meaning here. Cage plays a mysterious loner who picks up a small-town waitress (Amber Heard)

" What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. … He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing ... he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance. ... And he'll get all the great women." — Aaron Altman ( Albert Brooks)

If you must have a shtick, make it a good one. Robert Olen Butler is familiar with this dictum: His collection "Tabloid Dreams" was based on supermarket tabloids; the stories in "Had a Good Time" were drawn from vintage postcards; "Severance" was composed of 240-word pieces about the dying thoughts of the decapitated; and last year's "Intercourse" imagined the inner monologues of 50 famous couples as they had sex. Butler's new novel, "Hell," is...

The plainclothes security men came first, clustering in jeans, leather jackets and pointy black shoes. Then the policemen in gray uniforms and stiff hats; bulky men in dark suits who appeared to be in charge; a bus load of riot police in camouflage. A raw wind swept off the Moscow River on Saturday morning, past the souvenir peddlers with their tables of bright wooden matryoshka dolls and T-shirts emblazoned with Soviet iconography.

My parents have been calling me while I've been at the conventions for the last two weeks, asking if I have any "news." These people clearly don't read my columns like they say they do. I explained to them that the odds of securing an otherwise unreported tidbit at a staged event attended by every journalist in the world were about the same as anyone actually saying the Republican convention was in St. Paul, where it technically was, instead of...

My parents have been calling me while I've been at the conventions for the last two weeks, asking if I have any "news." These people clearly don't read my columns like they say they do. I explained to them that the odds of securing an otherwise unreported tidbit at a staged event attended by every journalist in the world were about the same as anyone actually saying the Republican convention was in St. Paul, where it technically was, instead of...

Satan is in Santa Ana -- and God is coming to Laguna Beach. No, that's not a quote from a sandwich-board sign worn by a street wanderer with a tangled beard and a wild look in his eye. This dual visitation is occurring because two Orange County art galleries decided to court the same exhibition: "100 Artists See God."

A Valencia woman was sentenced Friday to 16 years to life in prison for murdering an 18-year-old man in a Huntington Beach hotel after claiming to be the devil. Samantha Elizabeth Rothwell, 21, was convicted in April of stabbing Walter Rivas in the neck after he claimed to have seen God. Standing on a balcony at Hotel Huntington Beach on Aug. 15, 2006, Rothwell responded, "I'm the devil and don't talk about God or I'll stab you." She then took a small pocket knife from her purse and plunged it into the man's neck and back.

I DON'T know of any art form that has been declared dead more often than the realist novel. Even the term "realist novel" is a kind of pejorative -- don't we want something more entertaining and evocative than the daily news, served up in volume form, by some earnest nobody who still thinks his (or, more likely, her) insights are fresh and worthy of notice?