By PAUL C. CAMPOS, Scripps Howard News Service

Last week I gave a talk before a local theatre's production of Neil LaBute's play "Fat Pig." The play revolves around a workplace romance between a conventionally attractive (read: slim) man and a fat woman.

About ten years ago, I read a remarkable essay about an obscure tennis player named Michael Joyce. Joyce, a Californian who at his professional peak was ranked just inside the world's top 100 players. He was attempting to qualify for the main draw of a big tournament in Montreal, and the author of the essay, David Foster Wallace, chronicled the attempt.

Summer, 1990. I'm looking something up in the Harvard Law Review, and I notice the name of the review president on the issue's masthead: Barack Obama. My first thought (I'm white, by the way): A black guy is president of the Harvard Law Review. My second thought: He's got one of those "radical" names politicized people gave their kids in the 1960s.

A man I know has been doing a lot of flying lately while, among other things, conducting a more than normally problematic love affair. His agitated mental state has made him particularly prone to noticing and being annoyed by the absurdities of what has been labeled "security theater."

A ridiculous idea that has become a standard part of political talk in America is that politicians shouldn't "redistribute wealth."

For example last weekend John McCain went on Fox News and criticized Barack Obama for wanting to, in McCain's words, "spread the wealth around."

In November 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter published, in Harper's magazine, what would become a famous essay on some disturbing tendencies in American political life.

The parody rockumentary "This is Spinal Tap'' features a scene in which a fictional rock band's manager defends a particularly idiotic decision by pointing out that he was merely following the instructions of Nigel Tufnel, the band's profoundly clueless lead guitarist.

In what may end up being a particularly unfortunate example of poor timing, Donald Luskin, economic adviser to John McCain, published an article in Monday's Washington Post, arguing that, as his candidate avowed recently, the U.S. economy is fundamentally sound.

Rick Perlstein's new book "Nixonland" does a masterful job of describing the extent to which shamelessness gives a skillful politician a major advantage over ordinary humans.

In my younger and more vulnerable years I once got into a debate with a fundamentalist Christian about the morality of capital punishment. Her view was that the Bible sanctioned the death penalty, and as far as she was concerned that was the end of the matter.

What struck me most about her attitude toward the subject was her contempt for anyone who might see the question differently.