Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories... but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted d?j? vu.

The Apologizer Bunny keeps going and going and going.

Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Southerners are so devoted to genealogy that we see a family tree under every bush.

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

The American woman's concept of marriage is a clearly etched picture of something uninflated on the floor. A sleeping-bag withoutair, a beanbag without beans, a padded bra without pads. To work on it, you start pumping--what the magazines call "breathing life into your marriage." Do enough of this and the marriage becomes a kind of Banquo's ghost, a quasi-living entity.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.