It’s Yesterday Once More

My friend sent me this:

It reminds me of these passages from Philip Roth’s The Human Stain:

Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine… in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism – which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security- was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversivepleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony.

“The ecstasy of sanctimony”…I love that.

William F. Buckley referred to Clinton’s lack of judgement as “incontinent carnality.” That’s great, too.

Roth goes on: It was the summer in America when nausea returned, when the joking didn’t stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one’s children was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation,  and on both sides, people wondered, “Why are we so crazy?…”

Sound familiar?

 

Thanks to KB for blog fodder, which shall heretofore be referred to as “blogfod”.

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