If You Wear A Suit, You Can

A Certain Kind Of Rich Man Afflicted With The Symptoms Of Moral Dandyism Sooner Or Later Comes To The Conclusion That It Isn't Enough Merely To Make Money. He Feels Obliged To Hold Views, To Espouse Causes And Elect Presidents, To Explain To A Trembling World How And Why The World Went Wrong.

Money Is Like Fire, An Element As Little Troubled By Moralizing As Earth, Air And Water. Men Can Employ It As A Tool Or They Can Dance Around It As If It Were The Incarnation Of A God. Money Votes Socialist Or Monarchist, Finds A Profit In Pornography Or Translations From The Bible, Commissions Rembrandt And Underwrites The Technology Of Auschwitz. It Acquires Its Meaning From The Uses To Which It Is Put.

Further Strengthenings Of The Self-centered Instinct For Survival Recruit Even Greater Numbers Of People Into Some Sort Of Ring Of Fellowship (church Or Gender, Red State Or Blue) By Populating The Terra Incognita Outside The Ring With Enough Barbarians To Verify The Existence Of A Civilization Within--to Define The Preferred Stock By What, As All Good People Agree, It Decidedly Is Not.

About The Presence Of Death And Dying I Don't Remember The Society In The 1950s Being So Skittish As It Has Since Become. People Still Died At Home, Among Relatives And Friends, Often In The Care Of A Family Physician. Death Was Still To Be Seen Sitting In The Parlor, Hanging In A Butcher Shop, Sometimes Lying In The Street.

Dissent Is What Rescues Democracy From A Quiet Death Behind Closed Doors.