Quote/Unquote
Week of November 16, 2009
Eye-opener: NYT review of new book on how Teddy Roosevelt totally screwed up foreign policy--and caused WW II.
A rare shout-out to my favorite former Alaska senator, in Chris Hitchens' dissection of a fawning Palin book.
That the McCain team never seems to have understood just how much Alaska politics differed from that of the Lower 48 is one of many failures in the vetting process that netted Palin.
Week of November 9, 2009
The Obama administration has taken a giant step in its march to throw in the towel in the war against radical Islam. On FoxNews this morning, Peter King said of the decision to try the soldiers of al-Qaeda — who by their own account have no country but their cause — as civilians“may be the worst decision by a U.S. president in history.”
It certainly is. It sends a signal to terrorists everywhere to attack civilians.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday that some top al-Qaeda 9/11 conspirators will be tried by jury in New York not far from the scenes of devastation that they had wrought.Predictably, Republican critics vowed to fight the decision, since they much prefer to hold people forever without trial while torturing them, sort of the way some English kings did in North America before there was that pesky American constitution. In fact, on a whole range of issues, the contemporary Republican Party is a party of medieval romanticism. Its disquisitions on when the human person begins are theological in character and rooted in assumptions even a lot of medievals would have questioned. Its faith that bankers would never steal from us and so do not need to be regulated is a form of mysticism that medievals would have applied to saints. And its fascination with arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and with torture more recalls the star chambers of yore than the deliberations at Philadelphia over 200 years ago.
The most patriotic way to honor future veterans of foreign wars is not to create any unnecessarily.
Week of November 2, 2009
In retrospect, NY-23 was almost comical--another fine mess created by local and national GOP "leaders." And the results are plain for all to see. Republicans are now down to two, count 'em, two U.S. House seats out of 29 in New York state. In the mid-90s, they had 13 House seats--plus a U.S. senator and the governorship. Some compromise candidate in NY-23 would have delivered a victory to the GOP, instead of a defeat--the loss of a seat they have held since the early 1870s--that spoiled their otherwise good showing last night. I doubt these circumstances will be repeated quite as widely in 2010 as some think. Still, there are dozens of senior Republicans who have omelet, not just egg, on their faces over this debacle.
Amazon.com newsletter to subscriber
As someone who has purchased or rated John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography By The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best (Publicaffairs Reports) by Michael Kranish, you might like to know that [Mike Huckabee's] A Simple Christmas: Twelve Stories that Celebrate the True Holiday Spirit is now available. You can order yours for just $11.97 ($7.98 off the list price) by following the link below.
[David] Plouffe's book arrives at a crossroads moment for the administration -- exactly one year after the election, and one year before the 2010 midterms. A lot has happened in that year, as the audacity of winning has given way to the timidity of governing.
Unfortunately, in Washington terms, what's happened in Afghanistan is not the definition of failure. In the economic lingo of the moment, the war now falls into the category of "too big to fail," which means upping the ante or doubling down the bet. Think of the Afghan War, in other words, as the AIG of American foreign policy.
Week of October 26, 2009
Jonathan Brent expresses surprise—if not shock and disgust—at what he sees as the rehabilitation of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in contemporary Russia ("Postmodern Stalinism," The Chronicle Review, September 25).Pray tell: Is there an analytical difference between the phenomenon he perceives and the glorification and hagiography that bedeck the slaveholding "founding fathers" of his own United States (not to mention those that founded the settler colonies upon which this slaveholding republic was based)? Or is the difference that in this latter case, after all, we are discussing the brutalization of only Africans, and in the former case, non-Africans—and we all know that the lives of one are worth more than the lives of the other? Or is the difference that Stalin's rule lasted 30-odd years while North American enslavement was a process that stretched over centuries?
Greg Scoblete at Realclearworld.com takes me to task [1] for my item on the Baghdad bombing, in which I urged readers not to lose sight of the bigger picture — namely that the situation in Iraq has improved markedly over the past couple of years. He writes: "Iraq’s population is currently 29 million. A bombing that kills 155 Iraqis is the proportional equivalent of a bombing that kills 1,600 Americans. I wonder, in the wake of such an attack, if Boot would issue similar calls for context and urge us to recognize that America remains overwhelmingly safe and secure despite the occasional terrorist atrocity."This misses an important distinction. The United States has not been locked in a war on its home front for the past six years. Iraq has. At times that fighting became debilitating. In 2006 and early 2007, large swathes of Baghdad looked like a ghost town as residents fled in the face of Sunni suicide bombers and Shiite ethnic-cleansing squads. Today, by contrast, the capital is full of people, stores (including liquor stores) are open, and amusement parks are thronged.
Week of October 19, 2009
When Bush officials and Pentagon brass used "the long war" -- a phrase that never gained much traction outside administration circles and admiring think tanks -- they were (being Americans) predicting the future, not commenting on the past. In their view, the fight against the Islamist terrorists and assorted bad guys who wanted to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction and truly bloody the American nose would be decades long.And of that past? In the American tradition, they were Fordian (as in Henry) in their contempt for most history. If it didn't involve Winston Churchill, or the U.S. occupying Germany or Japan successfully after World War II, or thrashing the Soviet Union in the Cold War, it was largely discardable bunk. And who cared, since we had arrived at a moment of destiny when the greatest country in the world had at its beck and call the greatest, most technologically advanced military of all time. That was what mattered, and the future -- momentary pratfalls aside -- would surely be ours, as long as we Americans were willing to buckle down and fund an eternal fight for it.
[John Keegan in his new history of the American Civil War] writes about Southern women as if he is commenting on the Westminster dog show: “Southern women are a distinctive breed even today, admired for their femininity and outward-going personality.”
Week of October 5, 2009
CNN reports that nearly one in four human beings is Muslim, based on a new extensive survey by the Pew Forum for Religion in Public Life.The number of Muslims they estimate, about 1.5 billion, is the one I have been using for some time based on my own back of the napkin calculations, but one often sees in the press estimates of one billion or 1.2 billion. The Pew conclusions are higher than the researchers had expected going into the study.
If current demographic trends continue, moreover, the world could level off at about 9 billion persons in 2050, and nearly 1/3 of those could well be Muslim. The really big Muslim populations are not in the Middle East, which is largely arid and wouldn't support such populations. It is in relatively well-watered places such as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia in Asia where the bulk of Muslims live. Pakistan now has about 170 million people but is likely to rival the current US population of 300 million in the next few decades. (When I first went to Pakistan in 1981 I think its population was, like, 70 million).
I don't think most people in the West realize the implications of the likelihood that one-third of humankind may soon be Muslim. We don't have a real sense of scale in the US. We don't realize that Brazil alone is nearly as big as the US in area, or that the US could be fitted into East Africa. We don't realize how huge Iran is, or what it implies when we call India a subcontinent.
One of the implications is that the US is a little unlikely to thrive as a superpower in the 21st century if its more venal and bloodthirsty politicians go on barking about "Islamo-fascism" (they never said Christo-Fascism even though Gen. Franco in Spain was a good candidate for the label) and denigrating Islam and Muslims and seeking to militarily occupy their countries and siphon off their resources. That kind of behavior may have worked in the 19th century before Muslims were mobilized, but it does not work now.
Week of September 28, 2009
Usama Bin Laden's latest screed on the Western evacutation from Afghanistan is the height of hypocrisy, since Bin Laden actively connived at getting Western troops to go there. Abdel Bar Atwan is a prominent Arab journalist and intellectual. Here what he said about his meeting with Bin Laden in 1996:"Osama Bin Laden told me when I interviewed him in November 1996, 'I can’t fight the Americans on the American mainland. It is too far. But if I succeed in bringing the Americans where I can find them, where I can fight them on my own terms, on my turf, on my own ground, this will be the greatest success.' "
I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination... Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.
The lowest circle of hell are for people who are disloyal in the way this guy [former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer] is disloyal and the very lowest point Satan chews on their bodies. Maybe Scott McClellan will chew on this guy's leg in the after life. So creepy and so disgusting.
Week of September 21, 2009
Obama's disapproval ratings exceed those of every president since Eisenhower at this early stage--except for Clinton, who had similar disapproval ratings nine months into his first term. And they can't be explained as the inevitable result of the administration's honeymoon period coming to an end: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and George H.W. Bush all saw their popularity rise during the same period Obama's has fallen.
Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are turning Iran into a pariah state. I warn that if they keep going down this path, they are going to end up like North Korea.
Britain's libel laws have shamed us internationally. There's a pernicious peculiarity to libel, which allows for a case to be launched in the UK if someone in the country viewed the article on the net, wherever the website is based. It's just one of the many foolish, irresponsible and profoundly inane aspects of the way libel applies on the net. Another, which belongs firmly in a parallel legal universe where logic is considered frivolous, states that each day a new potential libel begins on a given article, complete with a new statute of limitations. Similar legal nonsense applies to books which anyone at all in Britain has read. Any kind of contact with the UK - digital or otherwise - means the case can be heard here. And it invariably is, because Britain has the most draconian libel laws in the civilised world.The burden of proof is on the defendant, not the claimant, meaning the writer has to prove he did not defame someone, rather than the other way round. The sheer wrongness of this state of affairs is overwhelming. You shouldn't have to prove you didn't rape or burgle anyone, so why should you have to prove you didn't defame anyone?
Choosing John McCain as our standard-bearer would be the height of self-delusion. It would be like putting Camilla Parker Bowles in charge of the Princess Diana Foundation.
Week of September 14, 2009
Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture.
I, for one, am not much surprised that such bleating-heart conservatism came from South Carolina. I mean, c'mon: This is a state that, more than any other, has been resisting progress for the Union--and the Union itself--since, well, before there even was a United States.This is a state whose slaveowners pressured Thomas Jefferson to remove condemnations of slavery from the Declaration of Independence. This is a state where loyalists rallied by the British as part of their "Southern Strategy"--the Brits' term, not mine--recaptured South Carolina from the patriots in 1780 as part of a plan to flip SC and Georgia and roll northward from there to smother the very revolution that birthers and tea partiers and Glenn Beck sychophants point to today as inspiration. This is the state that gave us senator and Vice President John C. Calhoun, who advocated state “nullification” of federal powers. This is also the state which became the first to secede from the Union to start the Confederacy—and even threatened to secede from the Confederacy when the other southern states refused to join its calls to re-open the slave trade. This is also the state that boasts of Congressman Preston Brooks, who in 1856 bloodied abolitionist senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane. (Top that, Rep. Wilson!)
All ancient history, you say? Not so fast.
Well into the 20th century, this was the state where black citizens observed the Fourth of July mostly alone. Why? Because--get this--the vast majority of whites preferred instead to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, May 10, a practice that continued into the early 50s, which means there are some very senior South Carolina citizens who skipped a few Fourths back in their early years. (Why isn't Sean Hannity asking them to brandish their flag pins?) In 1920, this was the state whose legislature rejected the women’s suffrage amendment, only ratifying it for symbolic purposes a half century later, in 1969. In 1948, this was the state where the legislature declared President Harry Truman’s new civil rights commission “un-American,” and that offered segregationist favorite son Strom Thurmond as the so-called Dixiecrat party's presidential nominee. And it was this state's Clarendon County, not Topeka, that was the original case that later became--and only after political intervention by Gov. James Byrnes to replace SC with KS--the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Is anyone surprised that this was the state that brought the first court challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act?
Joe Wilson's outburst? Puh-lease. Merely a peep, folks. Merely a peep.
History is not a DVD: conditions vary, outcomes are not repeatable.
Chris Rock, in his last tour, addressed the subject of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and asked, rhetorically and on behalf of the whites in the audience: Is it possible that a 70-year-old black man hates the whites? Let me enlighten you. You cannot find a 70-year-old black man who does not hate the whites.This made sense to me.
Week of September 7, 2009
Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices. But at this moment in our history, universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society.As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?
Hitler had the Hitler Youth, and Obama would like to have the Obama Youth.
[L]ooking back at American history, it's not only Clinton who failed to accomplish comprehensive health-care reform -- his effort joined reform charges by FDR, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter on the ash heap of history. Johnson, arguably the most accomplished legislator in American history, was too scared to try and brought us Medicare and Medicaid instead. It defies plausibility to suggest that president after president after president is blundering or inept. Rather, we should just admit the obvious -- people keep trying and failing to reform the health-care system because reform is hard to do.
Week of August 31, 2009
Baseball players on steroids swing for the fences. So does a steroidal country. When you have an immense military establishment, your answer to trouble is likely to be overwhelming force, including sending troops into harm's way. To rein in our steroidal version of militarism, we should stop bulking up our military ranks, as is now happening, and shrink them instead. Our military needs not more muscle supplements (or the budgetary version of the same), but far fewer.
When you are potentially running for president, in recent times, it tends to favor people who are wealthy, have a shtick or have some fame. I have none of those.
The number of Americans who trust President Obama to make the right decisions has fallen by roughly 17 percentage points. Obama’s job approval is down to about 50 percent. All presidents fall from their honeymoon highs, but in the history of polling, no newly elected American president has fallen this far this fast.
The unemployment rate in the city of Detroit rose to 28.9 percent in July, the highest rate of unemployment since Michigan started keeping modern number.
Week of August 24, 2009
Paul Krugman on Niall Ferguson
For the record, I don’t think that Professor Ferguson is a racist. I think he’s a poseur. I’m told that some of his straight historical work is very good. When it comes to economics, however, he hasn’t bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It’s all style, no comprehension of substance. And this time he ended up choking on his own snark.
Obama, unlike Bush:1. Has no plans to invade any new oil countries.
2. Knows who president of Pakistan is
3. Knows how to safely consume pretzels
4. Does not take orders from his veep
5. Not on vacation 40% of time
6. Clears away Bush's harm, rather than clearing brush on farm
7. Worried about 47 million uninsured, not about 47 thousand idle rich multi-millionaires
8. Not removing oversight from bankers on theory that financiers would never steal from own bank!
9. does not believe US menaced by Gog and Magog
10. Not ignoring threat of al-Qaeda
Week of August 17, 2009
As Afghans go to the polls in what is being widely decried as a flawed presidential election, a new Washington Post- ABC News opinion poll shows that American support for the Afghanistan War is collapsing. For the first time in two years, the percentage of Americans who said that the war was worth fighting fell below 50, all the way down to 47. Only 31 percent felt strongly about it being worth fighting.The bad news for Obama is that liberals and Democrats are far more hostile to the Afghanistan War than are Republicans. The Democratic majority in the House and the Senate could, if these numbers keep going south, become sufficiently afraid of their constituents that they vote to stop funding the war. Some close observers of Washington think the president only has a year or two before that confrontation with Congress takes place.
Michael Vick, the football player who's all over the news, should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans rather than only torturing them. Then we would have been told next to nothing about it at all. It might have been reported, but it wouldn't have become a hot topic, an echo-chambered story to be dismissed only after a great deal of hand-wringing. It certainly would not have interfered with watching football games.No, I don't support harming dogs. No, I don't really want people tortured. (Yes, I've had to explain that to the severely satire-impaired after making the above statements.) And, no, I don't really think murder is better than torture. Nor do I think murder by bomb or gun or suffocation is necessarily any worse than murder by health insurance company. But I am concerned that we arrest and prosecute people in this country for individual small-time acts of torture and murder, whether of people or dogs, but never for the large-scale authorization of torture or murder. We do, however, publicly worry about our souls because of mass-torture, whereas mass-murder doesn't seem to gain the same coverage in our corporatized communications system. Of course I want torture prosecuted, but torture is a symptom.
The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest.
Week of August 10, 2009
After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, [Dick] Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.
We're so past the Roman Empire by now that it's probably time to update the phrase "fiddling while Rome burns." What about, for instance, "writing fake letters ostensibly from real non-profit groups to weaken a climate-change bill while the planet burns"? It's true. According to the New York Times, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a coal industry and utilities trade group, "indirectly hired" a lobbying firm that did just that, sending piteous letters to congressional representatives from, for instance, the Albemarle-Charlottesville chapter of the N.A.A.C.P, claiming: "Many of our members are on tight budgets, and the sizes of their monthly utility bills are important expense items."
[Headline: "Taliban Briefly Take Logar Capital Near Kabul"]...For 12 or so fighters to occupy government offices in the capital of the province abutting Kabul directly to its south on the eve of a presidential election is sort of like al-Qaeda taking over Richmond, Virginia in late October in an election year. The guerrillas could only have succeeded because the Pul-i Alam police and military faded away rather than fight them. Only Afghan army and ISAF units from the capital were able to dislodge the guerrillas.
A specter is haunting the United States: the specter of nuclear attack without nuclear war.
Week of August 3, 2009
There's a lot of talk around Washington that Sarah Palin is the reincarnation of Richard Nixon. I find myself feeling offended on the old man's behalf. It's like comparing a Shakespearean tragedy to a Glenn Beck rant.
Week of July 27, 2009
We hit it off right from the beginning. When he's not arresting you, Sergeant Crowley is a really likable guy.
I applaud President Obama's invitation to Professor Skip Gates and Sgt. Jim Crowley to continue the "conversation" they ostensibly began on a porch in Cambridge, Mass., with Gates's arrest on a charge of disorderly conduct.Chalmers JohnsonTruth be told, however, the Gates-Crowley encounter did not begin on that porch. Nor will it will end at a White House talkfest, even in an atmosphere leavened by beer. And much more was at play than a conflict about deference or duty.
In fact, the alleged "loud" and "tumultuous" tone of Gates's voice, and the clanging of the cuffs on his wrists, were the sounds of two different versions of our racial history colliding with our collective amnesia about that history.
We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past -- including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example.
We in the West are living in the midst of a jihad, and most of us don't even realize it — because it's a brand of jihad that's barely a generation old.Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War. It's called the House of War because it, too, according to the Koran, is destined to be governed by sharia, and it will take war — holy war, jihad — to bring it into the House of Submission.
Week of July 20, 2009
The police who arrested Henry Louis Gates the day before yesterday must have been a miracle worker, or at the very least a lay clergyman of some kind. After all, what else are we to make of the moment when a property owner whose house had recently been broken into was himself transformed into the perpetrator? Such things do not merely happen; divinity must have been involved.
It’s a safe bet that 100 years from now most half-way educated people will know about Neil Armstrong. It’s also a safe bet that in a century the name Michael Jackson will be familiar only to five or six cultural anthropologists and, possibly, a medical historian. So what does it say about the United States in 2009 that the late moon-walker is a household name but the living one is not?
In our secular age, [Margaret] MacMillan adds [in her new book, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History], history has also displaced religion as a means of “setting moral standards and transmitting values.” So we now expect the “judgment of history” to be not merely objective and fair — the professional historian’s usual criteria — but identity-affirming, nation-making, virtue-inculcating and generation-binding as well. Small wonder that history has become such a hotly contested battleground, or that otherwise unbellicose professors are so often pressed into front-line service in the culture wars.
I’ve been covering Barack Obama for a few years, and it’s usually crystal clear what he is up to. Not last night. This is the first time I’ve asked myself: What was THAT all about?His prime time press conference was worse than a waste of time. He spent an hour (with the aide of a soporific White House press corps) pouring sand (one grain at a time) into the already-slowing gears of the machinery of health-care reform.
He made no real news on health care, but DID make news on race relations with his discussion of the Skip Gates case — thereby obscuring the topic he supposedly wanted to feature.
He issued no emotional clarion call, in the manner of Ted Kennedy. He didn't dwell much on heart-rending stories, in the manner of Ronald Reagan. He gave no clever policy lecture, in the manner of Bill Clinton. He issued no testosterone-fueled threats, in the manner of LBJ.
Week of July 13, 2009
Universal health insurance won't happen unless Obama can light a fire under the Senate Finance Committee this week. Within the next two weeks, the Committee must report out a bill that contains a public option and a credible source of money (either limiting deductions of the wealthy to 28 percent or capping tax-free employer-provided health care, or some of both). Obama then has to get both the Senate and the House (which reports out a bill today) to approve their respective bills before August 7, when Congress heads home for recess.Why is timing so important? Because the health-care clock is ticking, and doesn't have many weeks left. Universal health care is so complicated - touching on so much of the economy, stepping on the toes of so many vested interests - that to allow the bills to languish past recess risks the entire goal. Speed is essential. Recall that after Bill Clinton was elected, universal health insurance looked inevitable; a year later, it was doomed. As Lyndon Johnson warned his staff after the 1964 landslide, "every day while I'm in office, I'm gonna lose votes."
The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think: The average length of unemployment is higher than it's been since government began tracking the data in 1948.
Ms. Baskerville, who is black, made a startling discovery: Her great-great-great grandfather was owned by Carter Braxton, a Virginia signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Week of July 6, 2009
Joseph L. Galloway, military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers:
Well, the aptly named former Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the seventh level of hell. McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.
Speaking of the late Michael Jackson, you have to wonder whether some savvy satellite news channel could not make money counter-programing against channels that believe they have a divine right to all put on the same thing. Wasn't anyone at all interested in real news, such as the killing of 7 US troops in Afghanistan?
Week of June 29, 2009
Bulgarian Speleologists Discover Unique Thracian Sanctuary
Even in the legendarily liberated nineteen-sixties, mainstream attitudes toward homosexuality were benighted to a degree that is difficult to exaggerate. “Sodomy” between consenting adults was against the law almost everywhere. “Perversion” was a firing offense throughout the federal government, not just in the military. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic” mental disorder. In the Daily News, gays were “homos.” In 1966, three years before Stonewall, Time, then the voice of middlebrow, middle-class respectability, published a long essay on “The Homosexual in America.” The magazine, while acknowledging that “homosexuals are present in every walk of life,” concluded that homosexuality "is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness."
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