Love him or hate him -- and millions of people do just that -- Richard Dawkins is a brilliant evolutionary biologist and a compelling polemicist for atheism. In this very religious country, where atheist billboards generate protests, Americans tell pollsters that the last candidate they'd ever vote for is an atheist.

Nearly 60% of Americans have told pollsters they believe in creationism -- right along with a few presidential candidates; shouldn't atheism also be part of the discourse? Dawkins argues yes, and then some. He is going to be right here on Thursday's program with his new book about evolution, ''The Greatest Show on Earth.''

I would listen to Richard Dawkins reading the phone book -- is there still a phone book? -- so you won't want to miss this one.

The envelope for the Nobel Prize for Literature gets ripped open Thursday morning; one of the names that's usually high on the list of possibles is Philip Roth, the renowned American novelist> I interviewed him on Wednesday's program about his new novel, ''Nemesis.'' Few Americans now remember when polio was the terror and dread of every parent, and a vaccine was just a phantom hope. Roth crafts a story of a summer outbreak in a New Jersey neighborhood, and how it altered the life and character of one young man.

This is a fine and heart-breaking book, and as I told the author on the air, I turned each page with dread -- the same feeling that American parents must have awakened to on summer mornings when a child's play day could end in crippling disease and death. The book is all the more important in evoking the devastation of diseases that vaccinations can prevent, especially when some parents now refuse to get their children vaccinated.

Next week's hour-long U.S. Senate debate between Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer and Republican challenger Carly Fiorina promises to be a barn-burner -- right here at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, September 29.

And if you've ever fancied yourself sitting in my chair and asking the questions, now's your chance to have a shot at it, virtually.

We're hoping to be able to mix in some questions for the candidates from you, in your very own dulcet tones. Think of a policy question you'd like to put to the candidates and call our Patt Morrison message line at 626 583 5250. If your question is a winner, we might play it on air for the contenders, so be sure to leave your name, where you're from, and contact information so we can verify that it's not your stunt double doing the calling!

We've had some remarkable interviews this week, so if you missed any of them, do go to the Patt Morrison page and have a listen. Mel Brooks on Tuesday! Neil Sedaka on Monday! And the Great Typo Hunters on Thursday, two men who traveled the nation with [the lamentably misspelled brand-named] ''Wite-Out'' to correct orthographic solecisms -- including one on a particular historic sign at the Grand Canyon. That one got them haled into federal court, on a federal complaint that contained -- you guessed it -- misspellings.

Hasta Monday.

Patt Morrison

Far and away the most calls today, and the most dispiriting calls, were about childhood vaccinations – how students entering public kindergarten are supposed to have them but how often, very often, parents exercise a ‘’personal belief exemption’’ and don’t vaccinate their kids.

That ‘’belief’’ used to be about religious convictions; now it’s about the fear, fed by the fact that anyone can say anything at all on the Internet, that vaccinations are dangerous for children and even trigger autism.

If you heard the exasperation in my guests’ voices, it’s for good reason. The New Yorker’s Michael Specter wrote a chapter about this in his book ‘’Denialism.’’ He and pediatrician Peter Shulman are stupefied and alarmed by some of the claptrap being peddled as vaccine science on the Internet – and believed by otherwise educated, rational people who wouldn’t credit a back-fence rumor but buy into the same quality of ''information'' they find online.

Polio, measles, diphtheria – these killed multiple thousands upon thousands of American children just a few decades ago. They still do kill millions of kids around the world. Vaccination has been the single biggest instrument in defeating these communicable diseases – and yet as more parents choose not to vaccinate their kids, we’re endangering a young population growing up with no immunities to killer diseases, not because there is no protection, but because their parents choose not to avail themselves of it.

Without a doubt we’ll talk about this again.

Now I’m going to go on a small double-barreled rant about two irksome practices – and it occurs to me that a lot of you may already be converts on this.

The first is killing my ears. In English, when you use the word ‘’the’’ before a word that begins with a vowel, like ‘’the extra’’ or ‘’the opening,’’ the ‘’e’’ in ‘’the’’ is always pronounced wih a long ‘’e,’’ as in ‘’thee.’’

Try it yourself, right now. THEE extra, THEE opening, to distinguish where the article, ``the,’’ ends, and where the word after it begins.

Now, when the word – noun, adjective or adverb -- begins with a consonant, the ‘’e’’ can be short, as in, ‘’THUH blue house … THUH calendar … ‘’ But not when the word begins with a vowel.

The laudable pop culture example I can think of this rule comes courtesy of Jim Morrison, in the Doors’ seemingly endless song, ‘’The End,’’ when he’s singing, ``This is THEE end, my only friend, THEE end.’’

Amazing but true. I'm using rock-and-roll to teach pronunciation.

What I now hear constantly -- sorry, Gen Y, but this especially means you -- makes me cringe: ``THUH end.’’

I had to listen to a repeat-loop of a phone recording today: ‘’Your call will be answered in THUH order it was received.’’ And overhearing a conversation at a market: ``I was watching THUH Open,’’ meaning the tennis tournament.

That it is incorrect is only lamentable. But the ‘’THUH’’ phenomenon commits the far great offense of being ugly. The lyricism of English is one of the joys and glories of the language. How did this awful clunker get started, and how do we stop it? Tell me THEE answer, please!

The second irksome practice is something that ISN’T happening. Fewer people seem to be know, as the cliché goes, ‘’which way is north’’ [a cliché that used to mean knowing the obvious].

At least a half-dozen times in the last month, I’ve called a business to double-check a location, places like a chain store, a restaurant, a wireless phone shop.

We’re at the corner of X and Y, the clerk – associate – says. Which corner? I ask. Northeast? Northwest? Just the corner, I was told. There are four corners, I say. Which one is it, so I can figure out logistics?

The associates don’t know what side of the street the business is on. East or west? North or south? ‘’Next to Starbucks’’ one offered – which doesn’t help if you’re trying to plan a route. Or they’ll simply say, ‘’I don’t know,’’ in a tone that lets me know that I’m snotty for even asking, as if I’ve posed a question about quantum mechanics. One woman just handed the phone to her manager to answer me.

One associate was completely flummoxed when I asked, I’m heading west on Sunset, so which corner are you on? She asked, which way is west?

Is this a consequence of the Mapquest/GPS generation? Isn’t there a compass in the iPhone?

Some pretty startling content to Thursday’s program – and I’m not talking about just the news that the military is refusing to award Purple Hearts to some veterans who have concussion trauma from explosives, a story investigated and reported by NPR and ProPublica. There’s a link on the Patt Morrison page.

What took me aback even more was an argument put forward by a caller and a couple of commenters on the blog. A UC Berkeley researcher had found that poor people -- those earning under $25K a year -- give a higher percentage of their income to charity than do people earning above $75K. And not by a small margin, either -- 4.2 percent for the have-nots against 2.7 percent f or the haves.

There were of course lots of ways to slice and dice these numbers, like how much of this giving goes into church collection plates as compared to arts and cultural organizations, and whether the more prosperous are more likely to give to ''vanity'' nonprofits, like colleges or other institutions that have bigger ''bragging rights'' among some.

One caller objected to the guest's use of the word ‘’class,’’ as in ‘’upper class’’ and ‘’lower class.’’ We like to think of this country as class-free; here, ``class’’ ranks right up there with some four-letter words as a very filth noun indeed. But although we are a very aspirational and mobile society, we do have classes in this country, socially and economically. Paul Fussell’s fabulous book ‘’Class’’ nails a lot of this down. While we like to think of ourselves as classless and always use the example of Abe Lincoln, log-cabin-to-White House, the income divide has been getting larger, drifting toward more of a Gilded Age profile than the flattened class system we like to see in the national mirror.

But I was brought up short when a caller argued that the prosperous already give big dough to charity. It's just called by another name -- taxes. 

Seriously??

I know we Americans don’t like paying much for anything – evidence the Internet – but to suggest that taxes are a kind of forced charity? Some people might find that argument almost un-American. One of them would be the great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

He said that ''Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.'' More specifically, they're what we pay for the roads that take employees and suppliers to and from work and shopping, for police and Social Security, for fixing potholes and for public health programs. It’s what we pay to be able to flush the toilets, and have safe drinking water come out of the tap [and in my case, to call the county public health inspector to come out on a Saturday when my neighbor’s sewer line broke]. It’s what we pay for poor people to afford food so their kids – who sit in public school classrooms alongside everyone else’s kids – can concentrate and learn and grow up to be responsible neighbors and hire-able employees and consumers and taxpayers, and, just maybe, self-made millionaire entrepreneurs.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who grew up in a country that provides a kind of tax-supported universal health care program that he admired so much, was way off the mark when he was running for governor seven years ago. Here is what he said, and here’s my rejoinder in the LA Times.

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/26/local/me-patt26

For a moment there, I was really jealous of Glenn Beck.

At his rally in Washington, D.C. the chat show host told his fans that he had gone to the National Archives, the sanctum sanctorum for the nation’s most precious documents, and actually held, in his own two hands, ``the first inaugural address written in his hand by George Washington.’’

Oh my. To put your own fingers where George Washington’s were – a matchless, priceless experience, no? Anyone would be jealous of Mr. Beck’s privilege.

But it didn't happen. As politely as possible, the National Archives said so.

Beck, granted a VIP tour of the Archives, was simply allowed to gaze upon the extraordinary document, the speech delivered by the cannot-tell-a-lie Washington [the cherry tree story itself was a fabrication of Washington’s adulatory biographer Parson Weems]. But as for laying hands on it, or on any of these documents, ‘’those kinds of treasures are only handled by specially trained archival staff,’’ said archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.

Staff who wear gloves and other protective gear and doubtless work in an environment so immaculate that your average operating room is probably a teeming landfill by comparison.

The founding documents that are on public display in the Archives – the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence – are in bulletproof, helium-filled bronze cases that are lowered into a bomb-proof vault every night.

And now here’s where Glenn Beck can be envious of me.

There were perhaps 200 copies of the Declaration of Independence printed up hastily by a young Philadelphia printer named John Dunlap on the night of July 4, 1776. Fewer than 30 of those are known to survive, and only five of those are in private hands.

And I got to see one of them. Not from behind a red velvet rope. Not from ten or even five feet away, but nose to nose.

Thanks to the good offices of good friends, I was invited to see one of those privately held copies in one of those brief periods when it wasn't on tour. It lay in a climate-controlled sealed case, on a low table. To get close, I had to kneel, which was the right impulse anyway. Reverence was entirely in order; this is one of the great documents, the great moments, in human history.

I put my hands on either side of the secure case and looked long and closely at the Declaration of Independence, in the same way you’d hold a loved one’s face and look back into that pair of eyes.

 I’m always practically moved to tears by these conjunctions of the then and there, and the here and now. To stand within the same walls where Shakespeare once stood, for example, or to sit in the same restaurant where Thomas Jefferson dined, places me, through the thin conceit of time, in their company.

So to lay my own eyes on such a momentous object as this was to stand at the fulcrum of history.  Whose eyes had, like mine, also beheld this ``Dunlap broadside’’ when it was fresh off the presses 23 decades before? Thomas Jefferson’s? John Hancock’s? Was this the copy that was dispatched to General Washington in the field, or to the capitals of one of the 13 colonies?

Think of how a fan is thrilled by some small, fleeting contact with an adored movie star. To the movie star, it probably makes no difference, no impression at all. But to the fan, it is a moment of a lifetime. My small moment with this document, which existed for centuries before me and will survive long after I’ve vanished, gives me some tiny claim on its venerable history – and this country’s.

Speaking of venerable, James Ellroy -- who, like our first president, is quite the dandy dresser -- has finished his magisterial trilogy of modern American history and how brings us his own story, his mother’s murder and his life with and without and about women. ‘’The Hilliker Curse’’ and James Ellroy, both here on Tuesday.