I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady.

The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother. A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.... The emotionally satisfying discussions that take place in Chronic Pain Outreach and Depression Resources are simply updated versions of the grandmotherly practice of hanging crepe. We could eliminate much of the isolation that support groups exist to fill and save the "traditional family" that everybody is so worried about if more couples took their aging parents to live with them.

Oppressed people are treacherous for the simple reason that treachery is both a means of survival and a way to curry favor with one's oppressor.

By sending the contradictory message that the famous are just plain folks on Mount Olympus, America has forged a relentless tension between loftiness and accessibility. Stir in the fact that the inborn talent and intelligence needed to achieve fame are immune to distributive tinkering by government programs and you have a definition of fame certain to produce envious rage: somebody screwed democracy.

I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat.

Let's bring back grandmothers! A real family consists of three generations. It's time Americans stopped worrying about interference and being a burden on the children and regrouped under one roof.

In the last few years, race relations in America have entered upon a period of intensified craziness wherein fear of being called a racist has so thoroughly overwhelmed fear of being a racist that we are in danger of losing sight of the distinction.