Words Can Make The Illness A Subject

We Have Responsibilities For Others, Not Just Across Space But Across Time. We Have Responsibilities To People Who Came Before Us. They Left Us A World Of Institutions, Ideas Or Possibilities For Which We, In Turn, Owe Them Something. One Of The Things We Owe Them Is Not To Squander Them.

The Pleasures Of Mental Agility Are Much Overstated, Inevitably - As It Now Appears To Me - By Those Not Exclusively Dependent Upon Them.

Contrast 1968, When The Ceo Of General Motors Took Home, In Pay And Benefits, About Sixty-six Times The Amount Paid To A Typical Gm Worker. Today The Ceo Of Wal-mart Earns Nine Hundred Times The Wages Of His Average Employee. Indeed, The Wealth Of The Wal-mart Founder's Family In 2005 Was Estimated At About The Same ($90 Billion) As That Of The Bottom 40% Of The Us Population: 120 Million People.

It's Important To Remember That World War Ii Was Experienced Very Much As A Continuity In That Sense. Most Of World War Ii In Most Of Europe Wasn't A War; It Was An Occupation. The War Was At The Beginning And The End, Except In Germany And The Soviet Union, And Even There Really Only At The End. So The Rest Of Time It's An Occupation, Which In Some Ways Was Experienced As An Extension Of The Interwar Period. World War Ii Was Simply An Extreme Form, In A Whole New Key, Of The Disruption Of Normal Life That Began In 1914.

The Rottenness Of Politics In Yugoslavia Didn't Come As A Surprise. The Main Lesson Is That This Is A War Which Could Have Easily Been Stopped By Europe. What Was Lacking Was Any Will To Do So. It's An Irony Of The Achievement Of Europe That It Had Lived For 40 Years Under The Assumption Of The Unimaginability Of Internal Wars, So It Didn't Know What To Do With It When It Was Confronted With One Close Up.