Steal Away and Stay Away Education in a closing world once called free.
C oming out is all the rage.
Postmodernism, a fancy word for life at the close of the century, might even be defined as the cult of coming out, whether in the philosophy of Nietzsche, in the endless babble of talk television or in the Sappho confessions of sometime comedian Ellen DeGeneres. We hurdle toward the millennium with a warped confessional ideology that dictates we detail our every past romantic encounter to every future romantic encounter in the name of physiological health, and admit to our inevitable victimization for the sake of psychological health. We are consoled by the proposition that all men and women are created dysfunctional. Our guilt dissolves in the widening pool of fellow degenerates. Petty infidelities, white lies, small thefts, and everyday dishonesties disappear when mixed with vices of our neighbors and their neighbors and their neighbors.