I think Neal Peart also hit the nail dead center with "Limelight" -- "Living in the limelight, the universal dream for those who wish to seem." So in other words, performance and illusion. But he continues, "Those who wish to be, must put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme."

I'm adjusting my perceptions of how I view skeezy behavior and stuff that seems contradictory from public figures by applying the objective thinking model Robert Anton Wilson put forward in either his Cosmic Trigger books or one of the related ones -- we can't say anything definitive about someone or something, in fact pretty much the whole nouniverse, without adding specificity to it -- so saying, for instance, that bob is a plumber is inaccurate, because Bob isn't always a plumber, and there have been times when he wasn't and some where he won't be; the objective viewpoint is that Bob is working as a plumber as his career at this time in his life. Likewise, Isaac Asimov wasn't always a groper of women, and as far as anyone's told me he wasn't groping anyone without consent when he was writing. Of course, as flamingsword pointed out on a recent phone call, he's dead, so it's easier to deal with his genius in relation to his skeezy behavior.

RHPS has been pointed to as a mediocre script that somehow hit a nerve and now it's the longest running movie on its first run, still, unless something got FUBAR during the plague upon our houses. I believe that a lot of critics didn't understand what they were watching, even though it was in the first song of the entire thing -- it hit people in the face with what they were about to watch. For me it wasn't the subtexts and interactions on the stock, it was the social camaraderie in the audience participation with friends. I also got to it a bit before you did, so I'm told by your cadre things had changed some (though the criminologist still had no f'ing neck). Still, you're on the nose, the story is about flying a freak flag and getting executed for it -- what a crappy ending, though it didn't occur to me back then because I was too busy thinking up things to call out at the screen.

Let me know if you're interested in checking out the M:TA novel I'm working on.