Thanks for the quotation. Funny, I was just this a.m. catching up on the April issue of Harper's. It has Lapham's annual "Notebook" column on the World Economic Forum, and his usual, beautifully written, pointless satire of lost soul global-businessmen. This time he worried about the commercialization of patriotism at the Superbowl (which he watched from Bill Clinton's Harlem office, of course). He ends the column with a reminder that the Leviathan can't read.
Then on to an article, "Eternal Winter," on the fading Aral Sea. Another wonderfully written piece that concludes we're all a bunch of scoundrels, the Americans only a little less since we can afford to clean up our messes.
Both are wrong. They're wrong because they can't understand, as Machiavelli tells us, a free people take care of themselves. And I'm not sure I don't mind putting it on the face of a building.