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Upscale People Are Fixated With Food Simply Because They Are Now Able To Eat So Much Of It Without Getting Fat, And The Reason They Don't Get Fat Is That They Maintain A Profligate Level Of Calorie Expenditure. The Very Same People Whose Evenings Begin With Melted Goats Cheese... Get Up At Dawn To Run, Break For A Mid-morning Aerobics Class, And Watch The Evening News While Racing On A Stationary Bicycle.

-Barbara Ehrenreich

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Upscale People Are Fixated

Barbara Ehrenreich

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Upscale People Are Fixated With Food Simply Because They Are Now Able To Eat So Much Of It Without Getting Fat, And The Reason They Don't Get Fat Is That They Maintain A Profligate Level Of Calorie Expenditure. The Very Same People Whose Evenings Begin With Melted Goats Cheese... Get Up At Dawn To Run, Break For A Mid-morning Aerobics Class, And Watch The Evening News While Racing On A Stationary Bicycle.

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War Has Dug Itself Into Economic Systems, Where It Offers A Livelihood To Millions ... It Has Lodged In Our Souls As A Kind Of Religion, A Quick Tonic For Political Malaise And A Bracing Antidote To The Moral Torpor Of Consumerist, Market-driven Cultures.

There Is A Vast Difference Between Positive Thinking And Existential Courage.

Positive Thinking

Feminists Have Not Tried To "destroy The Family". We Just Thought The Family Was Such A Good Idea That Men Might Want To Get Involved In It Too.

No Job, No Matter How Lowly, Is Truly 'unskilled.

I Don't Know When The Cult Of Conspicuous Busyness Began, But It Has Swept Up Almost All The Upwardly Mobile, Professional Women I Know. Already, It Is Getting Hard To Recall The Days When, For Example, 'let's Have Lunch' Meant Something Other Than 'i've Got More Important Things To Do Than Talk To You Right Now.

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Wars Produce Warlike Societies, Which In Turn Make The World More Dangerous For Other Societies, Which Are Thus Recruited Into Being War-prone Themselves.

While Everything Else In Our Lives Has Gotten Simpler, Speedier, More Microwavable And User-friendly, Child-raising Seems To Have Expanded To Fill The Time No Longer Available For It.

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Yes. I Think The Anti-wal-mart Is Costco, Which Pays Much Better And Has Much Better Health Benefits And Which Is Profitable And Offers Low Prices.

If You Search The Bible, You Will Find No Reference To Birth Control Or Gay Marriage, And You Will Not Find A Word, Strangely, About Stem Cell Research. I Have Searched.

Both Chronic, Long-term Poverty And Downward Mobility From The Middle Class Are In The Same Category Of Things That America Likes Not To Think About.

A Great Deal Of The Wealth At The Top Is Built On The Low-wage Labor Of The Poor. Take Wal-mart, Our Largest Private Employer And Premiere Exploiter Of The Working Class. ... You Think It's A Coincidence That This Union-busting Low-wage Retail Empire Happens To Have Generated A $65 Billion Family Fortune?

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Upscale People Are Fixated With Food Simply Because They Are Now Able To Eat So Much Of It Without Getting Fat, And The Reason They Don't Get Fat Is That They Maintain A Profligate Level Of Calorie Expenditure. The Very Same People Whose Evenings Begin With Melted Goats Cheese... Get Up At Dawn To Run, Break For A Mid-morning Aerobics Class, And Watch The Evening News While Racing On A Stationary Bicycle.

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Native American

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Public Speaking

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Money Does Not Bring Happiness' - Only The Wherewithal, Perhaps, To Endure Its Absence.

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The Fastest-growing Brand Of Religion Is Of The Magical 'name It And Claim It' Variety, In Which The Deity Exists Only To Meet One's Immediate, Self-identified Needs.

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At Best The Family Teaches The Finest Things Human Beings Can Learn From One Another Generosity And Love. But It Is Also, All Too Often, Where We Learn Nasty Things Like Hate, Rage And Shame.

The "discovery" Of Poverty At The Beginning Of The 1960s Was Something Like The "discovery" Of America Almost Five Hundred Years Earlier. In The Case Of Each Of These Exotic Terrains, Plenty Of People Were On The Site Before The Discoverers Ever Arrived.

There Is The Fear, Common To All English-only Speakers, That The Chief Purpose Of Foreign Languages Is To Make Fun Of Us. Otherwise, You Know, Why Not Just Come Out And Say It?

From An Entertainment Point Of View, The Solar System Has Been A Bust. None Of The Planets Turns Out To Have Any Real-estate Potential, And Most Of Them Are Probably Even Useless For Filming Dune Sequels.

It's Even Occurred To Me, As A Teeny Little Subversive Whisper Of A Thought, That If We Stop Mowing The Lawn Right Now, It Will Probably Be A Long, Long Time Before The Yard Gets Overrun By Lions And Snakes.

No Culture On Earth Outside Of Mid-century Suburban America Has Ever Deployed One Woman Per Child Without Simultaneously Assigning Her Such Major Productive Activities As Weaving, Farming, Gathering, Temple Maintenance, And Tent-building. The Reason Is That Full-time, One-on-one Child-raising Is Not Good For Women Or Children.

I Grew Up Hearing Over And Over, To The Point Of Tedium, That "hard Work" Was The Secret Of Success: "work Hard And You'll Get Ahead" Or "it's Hard Work That Got Us Where We Are." No One Ever Said That You Could Work Hard - Harder Even Than You Ever Thought Possible - And Still Find Yourself Sinking Ever Deeper Into Poverty And Debt.

Finding Yourself

As A General Rule, When Something Gets Elevated To Apple-pie Status In The Hierarchy Of American Values, You Have To Suspect That Its Actual Monetary Value Is Skidding Toward Zero. Take Motherhood: Nobody Ever Thought Of Putting It On A Moral Pedestal Until Some Brash Feminists Pointed Out, About A Century Ago, That The Pay Is Lousy And The Career Ladder Nonexistent. Same Thing With Work: Would We Be So Reverent About The 'work Ethic' If It Wasn't For The Fact That The Average Working Stiff's Hourly Pay Is Shrinking, Year By Year.

But Our Culture Is In Truly Bad Shape If We Have Come To Define Respecting Something As The Failure To Set It On Fire.

War Cannot Be Used As A Means To Prevent Or Abolish Wars. ... The Idea Of A War To Prevent War Is One Of Its Oldest, And Cruelest, Tricks.

When You Watch Television, You Never See People Watching Television. We Love Television Because It Brings Us A World In Which Television Does Not Exist.

Thus Will The Fondest Dream Of Phallic Science Be Realized: A Pristine New Planet Populated Entirely By Little Boy Clones Of Great Scientific Entrepreneurs Free To Smash Atoms, Accelerate Particles, Or, If They Are So Moved, Build Pyramids -- Without Any Social Relevance Or Human Responsibility At All.

I Complain To One Of My Fellow Servers That I Don't Understand How She Can Go So Long Without Food. "well, I Don't Understand How You Can Go So Long Without A Cigarette," She Responds In A Tone Of Reproach. Because Work Is What You Do For Others; Smoking Is What You Do For Yourself.

So Even Though I Consider Myself A Fairly Upbeat Person, Energetic And Things Like That, I Never Do Very Well On Happiness Tests.

The Only Truly New Ideas [the Right] Has Come Up With In The Last Twenty Years Are (1) Supply Side Economics, Which Is A Way Of Redistributing The Wealth Upward Toward Those Who Already Have More Than They Know What To Do With, And (2) Creationism, Which Is A Parallel Idea For Redistributing Ignorance Out From Its Fundamentalist Strongholds To Those Who Know More Than They Need To.

Whether You Work Outside The Home Or Not, Never Tell Them [your Children] That Being A Mommy Is Your 'job.' Being A Mommy Is A Relationship, Not A Profession.

A Cynic Might Conclude That The Real Purpose Of The $500 Million-a-year Implant Business Is The Implantation Of Fat In The Bellies And Rumps Of Underemployed Plastic Surgeons.

The Less Sophisticated Of My Forbears Avoided Foreigners At All Costs, For The Very Good Reason That, In Their Circles, Speaking In Tongues Was Commonly A Prelude To Snake Handling. The More Tolerant Among Us Regarded Foreign Languages As A Kind Of Speech Impediment That Could Be Overcome By Willpower.

Our Great Common Challenge ... Is To Free People From Religion, Get It Out Of Our Laws, Our Schools, Our Health Systems, Our Government And, I Would Add, Also Our Sporting Events. I Would Really Like To See Some Separation Of Church And Stadium, If We Could Work On That.

Americans Love Marriage Too Much. We Rush Into Mariage With Abandon, Expecting A Micro-utopia On Earth. We Pile All Our Needs Onto It, Our Expectations, Neuroses, And Hopes. In Fact, We've Made Marriage Into The Panda Bear Of Human Social Institutions: We've Loved It To Death.

If Men Were Equally At Risk From This Condition - If They Knew Their Bellies Might Swell As If They Were Suffering From End-stage Cirrhosis, That They Would Have To Go Nearly A Year Without A Stiff Drink, A Cigarette, Or Even An Aspirin, That They Would Be Subject To Fainting Spells And Unable To Fight Their Way Onto Commuter Trains - Then I Am Sure That Pregnancy Would Be Classified As A Sexually Transmitted Disease And Abortions Would Be No More Controversial Than Emergency Appendectomies.

Medical Debts Are The Number-one Cause Of Bankruptcy In America.

Well I Do Think There Are People Who Are Habitually Negative And Depressed And Take The Opposite Approach Because They Imagine The Worst, And Their Minds Become Dominated By That. They Let Their Own Emotions And Expectations Transform Their Perceptions Of The World.

At Wal-mart, A Co-worker Once Advised Me That, Although I Had A Lot To Learn, It Was Also Important Not To "know Too Much," Or At Least Never To Reveal One's Full Abilities To Management, Because "the More They Think You Can Do, The More They'll Use You And Abuse You." My Mentors In These Matters Were Not Lazy; They Just Understood That There Are Few Or No Rewards For Heroic Performance. The Trick Lies In Figuring Out How To Budget Your Energy So There'll Be Some Left Over For The Next Day.

We [on The Left] Have To Be Used To Being A Minority -- A Small Minority -- For Some Time To Come. The Odd Thing Is That The Right, Even When It Is In Power, Likes To Think Of Itself As An Embattled Minority Against This Elite That Somehow Runs Everything. Whereas The Left, Even When It Has No Power At All, Likes To Imagine It Somehow Represents The Majority Of People. These Are Mirror-image Delusions.

Poverty Is Not A Character Failing Or A Lack Of Motivation. Poverty Is A Shortage Of Money.

Given The Cultural Barriers To Intersex Conversation, The Amazing Thing Is That We Would Even Expect Women And Men To Have Anything To Say To Each Other For More Than Ten Minutes At A Stretch.

Even When Uttered By Democrats, "middle Class" Often Sounds Like A Mealymouthed Way Of Saying, "us, And Not Them," Where "them" Includes Poor People, Snake Handlers And Those With Pierced Tongues.

Jesus: A Wine-guzzling Vagrant And Precocious Socialist.

The 'working Poor,' As They Are Approvingly Termed, Are In Fact The Major Philanthropists Of Our Society.

The Secret Of The Truly Successful ... Is That They Learned Early In Life How Not To Be Busy.

A Child Is Not A Salmon Mousse. A Child Is A Temporarily Disabled And Stunted Version Of A Larger Person, Whom You Will Someday Know. Your Job Is To Help Them Overcome The Disabilities Associated With Their Size And Inexperience So That They Get On With Being That Larger Person.

As Anyone Knows Who Has Ever Had To Set Up A Military Encampment Or Build A Village From The Ground Up, Occupations Pose Staggering Logistical Problems.

Marx Was Wrong: It Is Not Only The 'means Of Production' That Shape Societies, But The Means Of Destruction. In Our Own Time, The Costs Of War, Or Just War Readiness, Are Daunting. ... The Resulting Cost Squeeze Has Led To A New Type Of Society, Perhaps Best Terms A 'depleted' State, In Which The Military Has Drained Reources From All Other Social Functions.

I'm Not A Nice Person.

The Truth Is, Many Things Are Worth Doing Only In The Most Slovenly, Halfhearted Fashion Possible, And Many Other Things Are Not Worth Doing At All.

For The Millions Of Us Who Live Glued To Computer Keyboards At Work And Tv Monitors At Home, Food May Be More Than Entertainment. It May Be The Only Sensual Experience Left.

Personally, I Can't See Why It Would Be Any Less Romantic To Find A Husband In A Nice Four-color Catalogue Than In The Average Downtown Bar At Happy Hour.

It Is The Marketplace That Calls Most Clearly For Men To Be Softer, More Narcissistic And Receptive, And The New Man Is The Result.

The Money That Fueled The Explosion Of Gluttony At The Top Had To Come From Somewhere Or, More Specifically, From Someone. Since No Domestic Oil Deposits Had Been Discovered, No New Seams Of Uranium Or Gold, And Since The War In Iraq Enriched Only The Military Contractors And Suppliers, It Had To Come From Other Americans.

Considering The Absence Of Legal Coercion, The Surprising Thing Is That Men Have For So Long, And, On The Whole, So Reliably, Adhered To What We Might Call The Breadwinner Ethic.

Labor Is Like Motherhood To Most Of Our Political Leaders: A Calling So Fine And Noble That It Would Be Sullied By Talk Of Vulgar, Mundane Things Like Pay.

Once You Do Lose A Job, There Are Not A Lot Of Social Supports For You. You Lose Health Insurance Because We Have This Absurd System In America Where Health Insurance Is Usually Tied To Employment. Your Income Dips. And That's When You Get Into Selling The House.

The Republicans Hardly Need A Party And The Cumbersome Cadre Of Low-level Officials That Form One; They Have A Bankroll As Large As The Pentagon's Budget, Dozens Of Fatted Pacs, And The Well-advertised Support Of The Christian Deity.

The Psychological Trauma Of Losing A Job Can Be As Great As The Trauma Of A Divorce. It Creates A Lot Of Anger And Emotional Hardship. People May Become Quite Depressed.

I Think It's Tragic That We Have This Human Capacity, Which Appears To Be Hardwired, Or So The Evolutionary Biologists Say, For Collective Joy. We Have These Techniques For Generating It That Go Back Thousands Of Years, And Yet We Tend Not To Use This.

The Secret Of The Truly Successful, I Believe, Is That They Learned Very Early In Life How Not To Be Busy. They Saw Through That Adage, Repeated To Me So Often In Childhood, That Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well. The Truth Is, Many Things Are Worth Doing Only In The Most Slovenly, Halfhearted Fashion Possible, And Many Other Things Are Not Worth Doing At All.

We Need To Brace Ourselves For A Struggle Against Terrifying Obstacles...bot H Of Our Own Making And Imposed By The Natural World. And The First Step Is To Recover From The Mass Delusion That Is Positive Thinking.

Positive Thinking

When Our Children Are Old Enough, And If We Can Afford To, We Send Them To College, Where ... The Point Is To Acquire The Skills Not Of Positive Thinking But Of Critical Thinking.

Positive Thinking

Experimental Science Is Fascinating, But I Don't Want To Do It. I Want Other People To Do It, And I'll Read About It.

Experimental Science

In Sci-fi Convention, Life-forms That Hadn't Developed Space Travel Were Mere Prehistory -- Horse-shoe Crabs Of The Cosmic Scene -- And Something Of The Humiliation Of Being Stuck On A Provincial Planet In A Galactic Backwater Has Stayed With Me Ever Since.

Historians Differ On When The Consumer Culture Came To Dominate American Culture. Some Say It Was In The Twenties, When Advertising Became A Major Industry And The Middle Class Bought Radios To Hear The Ads And Cars To Get To The Stores. ... But There Is No Question That The Consumer Culture Had Begun To Crowd Out All Other Cultural Possibilities By The Years Following World War Ii.

If There Is No God Or No Evidence Of God And Certainly No Evidence Of A Very Morally Engaged God, Then Whatever Has To Be Done Has To Be Done By Us.

Evidence Of God

Transcendent Oneness Does Not Require Self-examination, Self-help, Or Self-work. It Requires Self-loss.

Marriage Is Socialism Among Two People.

The Nation Was Not Founded By Habitual Groupthinkers. But It Stands A Fair Chance Of Being Destroyed By Them.

America Is Addicted To Wars Of Distraction.

Individually The Poor Are Not Too Tempting To Thieves, For Obvious Reasons. Mug A Banker And You Might Score A Wallet Containing A Month's Rent. Mug A Janitor And You Will Be Lucky To Get Away With Bus Fare To Flee The Crime Scene.

War Is, In Some Not Yet Entirely Defined Sense, A Self-replicating Pattern Of Behavior, Possessed Of A Dynamism Not Unlike That Of Living Things.

You Can Turn Away The Mexicans, The African-americans, The Teenagers And Other Suspect Groups, But There's No Fence High Enough To Keep Out The Repo Man.

African American

We Need A Kind Of Feminism That Aims Not Just To Assimilate Into The Institutions That Men Have Created Over The Centuries, But To Infiltrate And Subvert Them.

Middle-class-led Reform Movements, From The Progressive Era To The War On Poverty, Have Been Marred By An Elitist Distance From The Would-be Beneficiaries Of Reform.

Crime Seems To Change Character When It Crosses A Bridge Or A Tunnel. In The City, Crime Is Taken As Emblematic Of Class And Race. In The Suburbs Though, It's Intimate And Psychological, A Mystery Resist To Generalization, A Mystery Of The Individual Soul.

The War With Iraq ... Had To Be One Of The Greatest Non Sequiturs In Military History. Attacked By A Gang Composed Largely Of Islamic Militants From Saudi Arabia, The United States Countered By Invading An Unrelated Country, And One Of The Most Secular In The Middle East At That.

The One Regret I Have About My Own Abortions Is That They Cost Money That Might Otherwise Have Been Spent On Something More Pleasurable, Like Taking The Kids To Movies And Theme Parks.

To Live In Poverty Is To Live With Constant Uncertainty, To Accept Galling Indignities, And To Expect Harassment By The Police, Welfare Officials And Employers, As Well As By Others Who Are Poor And Desperate.

What We Need Is A Tough New Kind Of Feminism With No Illusions. Women Do Not Change Institutions Simply By Assimilating Into Them. We Need A Feminism That Teaches A Woman To Say No - Not Just To The Date Rapist Or Overly Insistent Boyfriend But, When Necessary, To The Military Or Corporate Hierarchy Within Which She Finds Herself. We Need A Kind Of Feminism That Aims Not Just To Assimilate Into The Institutions That Men Have Created Over The Centuries, But To Infiltrate And Subvert Them.

We Are Reaching The Point, If We Have Not Passed It Already, Where The Largest Public Housing Program In America Will Be Our Penitentiary System.

That's Free Enterprise, Friends: Freedom To Gamble, Freedom To Lose. And The Great Thing - The Truly Democratic Thing About It - Is That You Don't Even Have To Be A Player To Lose.

Upscale Young Men Seem To Go For The Kind Of Woman Who Plays With A Full Deck Of Credit Cards, Who Won't Cry When She's Knocked To The Ground While Trying To Board The Six O Clock Eastern Shuttle, And Whose Schedule Doesn't Allow For A Sexual Encounter Lasting More Than Twelve Minutes.

Ineluctably, The Insults Inflicted In One War Call Forth New Wars Of Retaliation, Which May Be Waged Within Months Of The Original Conflict Or Generations Later.

It Seems To Me That There Must Be An Ecological Limit To The Number Of Paper Pushers The Earth Can Sustain.

The Label Of Liberalism Is Hardly A Sentence To Public Ignominy: Otherwise Bruce Springsteen Would Still Be Rehabilitating Used Cadillacs In Asbury Park And Jane Fonda, For All We Know, Would Be Just Another Overweight Housewife.

It Used To Be Almost The First Question (just After 'can You Type?') In The Standard Female Job Interview: 'are You Now, Or Have You Ever, Contemplated Marriage, Motherhood, Or The Violent Overthrow Of The U.s. Government?

Surely There Must Be Some Way To Find A Husband Or, For That Matter, Merely An Escort, Without Sacrificing One's Privacy, Self-respect, And Interior Decorating Scheme. For Example, Men Could Be Imported From The Developing Countries, Many Parts Of Which Are Suffering From A Man Excess, At Least In Relation To Local Food Supply.

It Seems To Me That There Must Be An Ecological Limit To The Number Of Paper Pushers The Earth Can Sustain, And That Human Civilization Will Collapse When The Number Of, Say, Tax Lawyers Exceeds The World's Total Population Of Farmers, Weavers, Fisherpersons, And Pediatric Nurses.

I Realize That After Decades Of Positive Thinking The Notion Of Realism, Of Things As They Are, May Seem A Little Quaint. ... When The Stakes Are High Enough And The Risks Obvious, We Still Turn To People Who Can Be Counted On To Understand Those Risks And Prepare For Worst-case Scenarios. A Chief Of State Does Not Want To Hear A General In The Field Say That He 'hopes' To Win Tomorrow's Battle Or That He's 'visualizing Victory'.

Positive Thinking

Racist, Sexist, And Homophobic Thoughts Cannot, Alas, Be Abolished By Fiat But Only By The Time-honored Methods Of Persuasion, Education And Exposure To The Other Guy's-or Excuse Me, Woman's-point Of View.

People Tend To Judge Presidents On How The Economy Performs, And Yet We Don't Expect Them To Have The Power To Do Much About It. Or We Don't Want Them To Exercise That Power, If They Were To Have It.

Consider The Standard Two-person Married Couple. ... They Will Share A Vcr, A Microwave, Etc. This Is Not A Matter Of Ideology Or Even Personal Inclination. It Is Practically The Definition Of Marriage. Marriage Is Socialism Among Two People.

An Asteroid Could Hit Us At Any Moment. This Is Not - And Also, The Most Successful Kind Of Life On This Planet Is Not Us, It's Microbes. They're The Ones Who Greatly Outnumber Us, And May Eventually Destroy Us.

Human Intellectual Progress, Such As It Has Been, Results From Our Long Struggle To See Things 'as They Are,' Or In The Most Universally Comprehensible Way, And Not As Projections Of Our Own Emotions. Thunder Is Not A Tantrum In The Sky, Disease Is Not A Divine Punishment, And Not Every Death Or Accident Results From Witchcraft. What We Call The Enlightenment And Hold On To Only Tenuously, By Our Fingernails, Is The Slow-dawning Understanding That The World Is Unfolding According To Its Own Inner Algorithms Of Cause And Effect, Probability And Chance, Without Any Regard For Human Feelings.

Whenever People Can Access Deities Directly Without The Intervention Of A Religious Hierarchy, They Don't Need To Have Hierarchy So Much.

The Urge To Transform One's Appearance, To Dance Outdoors, To Mock The Powerful And Embrace Perfect Strangers Is Not Easy To Suppress." --barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing In The Streets, 260.

People Who Just Pretend To Have A Positive Attitude May Be More Acceptable, But They Will Still Attract According To How They Are Really Vibrating- The Energy They Are Emanating Will Attract Their Circumstances.

Natural Selection, As It Has Operated In Human History, Favors Not Only The Clever But The Murderous.

In A Process That Had Begun In The 1980s And Suddenly Accelerated In The Early 2000s ... [t]he Peaks Of Great Wealth Grew Higher, Rising Up Beyond The Clouds, While The Valleys Of Poverty Sank Lower Into Perpetual Shadow. The Once Broad Plateau Of The Middle Class Eroded Away Into A Narrow Ledge, With The White-knuckled Occupants Holding On For Dear Life.

The Failure To Think Positively Can Weigh On A Cancer Patient Like A Second Disease.

If That's How It All Started, Then We Might As Well Face The Fact That What's Left Out There Is A Great Deal Of Shrapnel And A Whole Bunch Of Cinders (one Of Which Is, Fortunately, Still Hot Enough And Close Enough To Be Good For Tanning). Trying To Find Some Sense And Order In This Mess May Be As Futile As Trying To ... Reconstruct The Economy Of Iowa From A Bowl Of Popcorn. [on Searching For Evidence Of The Big Bang.]

It Was A Real Surprise To Me To Come Across The Evidence That Christianity Might Once Have Been A Danced Religion. Certainly, Some Of The Early Church Leaders Thought This Was Great And Spoke Of What Seems To Have Been Circle Dancing, Perhaps Around An Altar.

In Our Culture, The Professional, And Largely White, Middle Class Is Taken As A Social Norm - A Bland And Neutral Mainstream - From Which Every Other Group Or Class Is Ultimately A Kind Of Deviation.

Take Motherhood: Nobody Ever Thought Of Putting It On A Moral Pedestal Until Some Brash Feminists Pointed Out, About A Century Ago, That The Pay Is Lousy And The Career Ladder Nonexistent.

Some Of Us Still Get All Weepy When We Think About The Gaia Hypothesis, The Idea That Earth Is A Big Furry Goddess-creature Who Resembles Everybody's Mom In That She Knows What's Best For Us. But If You Look At The Historical Record - Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, Poison Ivy, And So Forth Down The Ages - You Have To Ask Yourself: Whose Side Is She On, Anyway?

Marriage Probably Originated As A Straightforward Food-for-sex Deal Among Foraging Primates. Compatibility Was Not A Big Issue, Nor, Of Course, Was There Any Tension Over Who Would Control The Remote.

The Feminist Anti-pornography Movement, No Less Than The Feminist Movement Of A Century Ago, Encourages The Assumption That Male And Female Sexuality, And Possibly Morality, Are As Unlike As Yin And Yang.

That's The Really Neat Thing About Dan Quayle, As You Must Have Realized From The First Moment You Looked Into Those Lovely Blue Eyes: Impeachment Insurance.

A Free-enterprise Economy Depends Only On Markets, And According To The Most Advanced Mathematical Macroeconomic Theory, Markets Depend Only On Moods: Specifically, The Mood Of The Men In The Pinstripes, Also Known As The Boys On The Street. When The Boys Are In A Good Mood, The Market Thrives; When They Get Scared Or Sullen, It Is Time For Each One Of Us To Look Into The Retail Apple Business.

The Media Have Just Buried The Last Yuppie, A Pathetic Creature Who Had Not Heard The News That The Great Pendulum Of Public Consciousness Has Just Swung From Greed To Compassion And From Tex-mex To Meatballs

However And Wherever War Begins, It Persists, It Spreads, It Propagates Itself Through Time And Across Space With The Terrifying Tenacity Of A Beast Attached To The Neck Of Living Prey. This Is Not An Idly Chosen Figure Of Speech. War Spreads And Perpetuates Itself Through A Dynamic That Often Seems Independent Of Human Will. It Has, As We Like To Say Of Things We Do Not Fully Understand, 'a Life Of Its Own.

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