The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmoth.

It's the Government's job to print the money, deliver the mail and declare war. Now give me my cigarettes.

American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.

When women talk about "privacy" they mean abortion rights, and the millions of words feminists have written about "a room of one'sown" refer to psychological space, rarely to physical solitude. For most women being alone is tantamount to being deserted.

We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust; a president with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to the U.S. government, whose Nice Guyism will narrow the gap between the U.S. and us until nobody can tell the difference.

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.

People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.