Often these days I'll read or hear a story that just tears loose from me some hard, bitter laughs - news that some folks out there just don't get it, don't realize how much things have changed.

From the Insatiable Critic:

Desperate times...Morton's the Steakhouse tried to charge Dan Dorfman $2.50 for ice cubes last week.  When Dorfman protested, he was told it was $2.50 extra for a drink ordered "on the rocks." The legendary financial writer and investigative reporter counted five ice cubes, fifty cents a rock..."

Fifty cents! Per cube, I'm tellin' ya! We didn't realize we have goldmines in our Frigidaires, did we? Get li'l Margie out on the front walk with a cash register and a parasol, I'll keep the trays a-comin' and f*ck the LOTTERY! 

Ooo. Desperate!

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My childhood supper table occasionally was buffeted by war.

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A few rivulets of agreement soak through the customarily granitic fronts presented by America's Right and Left as their public contrapositions - areas of consensus made possible if only by obviousness of need or inability of either political wing to mount remedies or articulate formulas to quandaries and common, unattainable objectives.

Not that these accords easily come to mind. The seriousness of crimes against children is one. Maybe... the need to ricochet from earthly landfall a termination-event asteroid. Both camps share suspicions about investing governments with too much power - although this disquiet depends on being the alternating "outsider" party at any given time. When either wing is giving the orders, passions revert to increasing strength of administrative power, not diminishing it.

Maybe, when the lights are down, both sides find grounds for compact on the Iraq War and its prosecution.

And there is the matter of immigration. Both sides agree, for reasons uniformly distinct and their own, that we need more and more people - bigger immigration numbers, legal and illegal.

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