All Intensive Purposes

With metronomic regularity, the United States, for one, always seems to be losing its innocence -- the Kennedy assassination, the urban disturbances of the sixties, Vietnam, the Church committee's CIA revelations, Three Mile Island, the smoking cancer scandals, the John Lennon assassination, Iran Contra, the priest pedophile imbroglio, September 11, Abu Ghraib (to detail just one recent trill) -- and yet Americans never seems to learn anything, repeatedly emerging as resolutely innocent (which is to say, unknowing) as they were before the latest brief seizure of lucidity.

// posted by t.s. @ 8:31 AM