Unlike Any Other Business In The United

The Genius Of Capitalism Consists Precisely In Its Lack Of Morality. Unless He Is Rich Enough To Hire His Own Choir, A Capitalist Is A Fellow Who, By Definition, Can Ill Afford To Believe In Anything Other Than The Doctrine Of The Bottom Line. Deprive A Capitalist Of His God-given Right To Lie And Cheat And Steal, And The Poor Sap Stands A Better Than Even Chance Of Becoming One Of The Abominable Wards Of The State From Whose Grimy Fingers The Reagan Administration Hopes To Snatch The Ark Of Democracy.

But The Line Of Thought That I'd Been Chasing For Several Days Was Implicit In The Ruins Of The Old Roman Empire, Which Gradually Destroyed Itself By Substituting The Faith In A Legion Of Miraculous Words For The Strength Of Armies And The Weight Of Walls.

Usually When I Drank Too Much, I Could Guess Why I Did So, The Objective Being To Murder A State Of Consciousness That I Didn't Have The Courage To Sustain--a Fear Of Heights, Which Sometimes During The Carnival Of The 1960s Accompanied My Attempts To Transform The Bourgeois Journalist Into An Avant-garde Novelist. The Stepped-up Ambition Was A Commonplace Among The Would-be William Faulkners Of My Generation; Nearly Always It Resulted In Commercial Failure And Literary Embarrassment.

Label Celebrity A Consumer Society's Most Precious Consumer Product, And Eventually It Becomes The Hero With A Thousand Faces, The Packaging Of The Society's Art And Politics, The Framework Of Its Commerce, And The Stuff Of Its Religion.

Youth As Glimpsed By Its Elders Is A Story That Comes From Afar, Showing Itself As Either Lovely To Look At Or A Torment To Endure.