America Is Addicted To Wars Of Distraction.

I Have A Ph.d. In Cell Biology. And That's Really Manual Labor. I Mean, Experimental Science, You Do It With Your Hands. So It's Very Different. You're Out There In A Lab, Cleaning Test Tubes, And It Just Wasn't That Fascinating.

As A General Rule, When Something Gets Elevated To Apple-pie Status In The Hierarchy Of American Values, You Have To Suspect That Its Actual Monetary Value Is Skidding Toward Zero. Take Motherhood: Nobody Ever Thought Of Putting It On A Moral Pedestal Until Some Brash Feminists Pointed Out, About A Century Ago, That The Pay Is Lousy And The Career Ladder Nonexistent. Same Thing With Work: Would We Be So Reverent About The 'work Ethic' If It Wasn't For The Fact That The Average Working Stiff's Hourly Pay Is Shrinking, Year By Year.

So Why Do People Keep On Watching? The Answer, By Now, Should Be Perfectly Obvious: We Love Television Because Television Brings Us A World In Which Television Does Not Exist. In Fact, Deep In Their Hearts, This Is What The Spuds Crave Most: A Rich, New, Participatory Life.

Warriors Make Wars, But It Is Also True That, In What Has So Far Been An Endless Reproductive Cycle, War Makes Warriors.

There Can Be No More Ancient And Traditional American Value Than Ignorance. English-only Speakers Brought It With Them To This Country Three Centuries Ago, And They Quickly Imposed It On The Africans--who Were Not Allowed To Learn To Read And Write--and On The Native Americans, Who Were Simply Not Allowed.