I consider myself rather ordinary looking, neither good looking nor its opposite. (I wait in vain for friends and acquaintances to protest my self-description as too modest.) I just sort of blend into the woodwork, at least when I am alone. But even so, I am part of a highly visible family.

The spouse, on the other hand, has always been conspicuous.  She was born with her right leg significantly shorter than the left, and she has always worn a brace on that leg. The brace has taken various forms, but since I have known her, two pieces of metal on the side of the leg extend above and below her shoe. The shoe sits on a metal plate and is attached to the plate by a T-bolt. A crosspiece is at the bottom of the brace covered in tire rubber, and this is the “sole” she walks on. A leather cuff is at the top of the brace, and this wraps around her leg and fastens with Velcro. Of course, this makes her noticeable, and that does have a benefit. People do not have to meet her three or four times, as they do me, to remember her, and acquaintances from decades ago instantly recognize her.

On the other hand, strangers regularly stare at her.  Sometimes we have joked about it. In my small northern hometown, we stood outside a downtown department store. Some curious Wisconsinites stopped about ten feet away and stood and gaped. She looked uncomfortable, and I said, “They have never seen anyone from Florida before.” She laughed.

Little kids do not always stand ten feet away to stare. Many come right up to her with eyes locked on the brace. Some ask about it. The wife has a patter for these situations—“I was born that way; were you born with a short leg?”–but it gets wearisome. And often the parents are embarrassed or get angry at their child for their apparent rudeness, and this only makes things worse.

In my initial years with her, I learned to accept what she had long before accepted—not to be surprised by the stares and comments, but that never meant that the looks and words were welcomed. These experiences, however, did make me reflect on some of my own childhood behavior.

My hometown, like many small places in the Upper Midwest, was all white. Six miles north of us, however, was a small Army base. (I don’t know what the point to the base was, but we could hear gunnery practice on occasion. We would see over Lake Michigan small pilotless planes—drones–towing targets. We assumed that when the planes got to the base, shells were fired at the targets. If invaders flew at fifty miles per hour like these planes, I knew we would be safe.) Some of the soldiers were black, and on a few occasions these soldiers would come to our downtown. They stood out, perhaps even more than the spouse. I know that once at the very corner outside that very same department store where she was stared at, when I was ten or twelve, I stood motionless across the street and stared and stared at a black soldier. Because of the wife, only decades later did I get an inkling of what that man might have been feeling.

The spouse was conspicuous and when I was with her, we formed a conspicuous couple. And then along came the daughter.

(Concluded on May 4.)

I learned yet again that, even if it is run at its slowest speed, it is a mistake to leave the top off the blender.

Chalked on a sidewalk sign in Times Square: “Special. 2 drinks for the price of 2 drinks.”

When I want to feel special, I tell myself that I am one of the few people who knows that Tarzan lived in Wisconsin.

“There is nothing that makes a man grow beyond his own stature than a woman telling him she loves him.” Jo Nesbø, The Headhunters.

The news article said that three men who had just been convicted of various crimes “could face up to life imprisonment.” Isn’t this redundant? If life is the maximum possible punishment, then the judge “could” give them a life sentence, but before they are sentenced, they “face” life imprisonment.

I have heard often of the “undeserving poor,” but never of the “undeserving rich,” even though there are many in that latter category.

At a meet-and-greet, the candidate said what I have heard from many others: “We can do whatever we set our minds to.” Each time I hear this cliché, I think: Poppycock.

Language matters. Instead of talking about eliminating regulations, we could be talking about eliminating protections.

“Her older sister used to say that men hated pity; rather, they wanted sympathy and admiration—not an easy combination.” Min Jin Lee, Pachinko.

It was the night before the twenty-fifth reunion. A group had assembled at a bar that was a hangout in the years after the high school graduation. Marty went up to the bar. Marty had been a middling student. Marty had been a middling athlete. But Marty had moved high up the executive chain in a local corporation and was a semi-bigwig in the small community. Marty ordered a beer. The bartender turned to get the ordered bottle. Marty put $10 down. But then after the briefest of moments, as the bartender turned to uncap the bottle, Marty looked around to see if anyone was watching but did not see me. He put his hand over the bill, palmed it, and put it in his pocket. Then somewhat conspicuously he went to his wallet and laid down a $100 bill on the middle of the bar.

A caption to a picture in a Hilton Head Coastal Discovery Museum publication states, “From the 1920s until the 1970s, several island families operated oyster factories. In the Hudson factory, over 250 gallons of oysters were shucked each day by the women working there. Workers were paid with Hudson money, which could only be used at the Hudson store.” I was struck by the fact that they were paid in scrip redeemable only at the company store.

Company stores, often associated with logging or mining operations, have served useful purposes. When workers are lodged in a remote place cut off from transportation that allows reasonable access to other commerce, a store provided by the company may be a necessity.

Payment in scrip redeemable at the company store can also make sense. Cash will not be easily flowing in and out of that remote logging camp, and the cash flow of the logging company might be restricted for long periods if logs are only sold at protracted intervals. Under such circumstances, regular payment in scrip might be fairer to the workers than irregular cash wages.

Company stores, while having a purpose, however, have mostly lived in infamy. First, they had high prices. Part of the reason for that came naturally from their remote locations. The transportation costs for the goods had to be higher than for goods in more normally-trafficked places. But prices were also high because company stores had a monopoly. Competition did not moderate what the company stores charged, and many company stores took advantage of their monopolies to gouge the workers

Company stores were also quick to extend credit. This might seem to be a good thing, but the companies did not do this out of a charitable impulse. Workers often found themselves in debt to the company store and that bound them to the job they were in until they could pay off the debt. The store often served the company’s purpose of helping to insure the availability of a generally low-wage workforce. People my age remember Sixteen Tons sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford, a song about a coal miner. (You can check it out, I am sure, on YouTube.) The way I remember the lyrics: “You load sixteen tons and whadaya get/another day older and deeper in debt/St. Peter doncha call me cuz I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store.”

The company store for the Hilton Head oyster factories may have made sense before the bridge to the mainland was built. The payment in scrip, however, seems more problematical. While it may not have been easy to regularly move goods onto the island before the bridge, ferries regularly went to Savannah and other mainland points. Cash could have easily come and gone from the island, and while logs may have only been moved once a year for sale, canned oysters were no doubt regularly move off the island and sold. The companies surely had regular infusions of cash.

Wages paid in scrip redeemable at the company store also served to bind  the worker to the company. Imagine a worker in the Hilton Head oyster factory who gets a letter from a cousin in Philadelphia encouraging her to move north for a good job. But how is she to pay for a trip north? Even if she scrimps and saves, she does not get paid with almighty dollars that can pay the bus fare north. No, that scrip-paid worker is bound to her job. Her work only allows her to buy things at the company store, not elsewhere. And if workers through scrip pay and company-store debt are bound to the job, the employer does not have to compete through wages for workers. Pay will be low.

The interplay between debt to the company store and payment in scrip is often characterized as a form of debt bondage or debt slavery. The worker can’t stop working for the company as long as there is the debt, and there is almost no way to pay it off. It is not really slavery, but it is not really freedom either, or that was my thought as the Hilton Head oyster factories were in my mind when I recently attended Matata and Jesse James: An American Tragedy, a play by Dan Friedman. In the drama, a slave couple had just been emancipated, and the wife asks, “Yes, but what does it mean to be free?” Her husband responds, “We can work for wages.” Later in the play when a storekeeper is reluctant to sell the black man seed, he replies that then he will go over to the next town and make the purchase. Getting paid wages, being able to choose where to shop are hallmarks of freedom, but for some on Hilton Head this freedom did not exist when affluent people were buying property and building houses. There was a divide on that island, but I am not sure that the people behind the gates were overly concerned about it. I doubt that they asked each other, “Do you have a friend who gets paid in scrip?”

These particular divided Hilton Head worlds did not overlap for long. The oyster factories closed shortly after the resort developments began. Part of the reason was overharvesting and foreign competition, but the developments themselves helped cause the demise. The marinas and the golf courses and the homes produced pollution that harmed the oyster beds, and the factories had to compete for labor with construction, resort, and retail jobs that the developments brought. Keeping workers bound to low-wage employment through scrip and a company store no longer worked.

Our country’s history has been filled with divisions. North and South. Rich and poor. Smokers and non. Churchgoers and the backsliders. And so on. There has never been just one question that would highlight all of America’s dividing lines. But if we are going to contemplate such questions, here is perhaps a meaningful one that Hilton Head history suggests, “Do you live in a gated community?”

The segregated and impoverished world outside the gates may not have been apparent to the new arrivals to Hilton Head. If they had looked, they would have seen a relatively new school building for young black students. The segregated Hilton Head Elementary School, limited to blacks, was built in 1954 as part of the South Carolina School Expansion Program that operated from 1951 to 1954. A new school building might have seemed to indicate a concern for a quality education, but improving the education of black children was not the driving force behind the effort. Indeed, many elected South Carolina officials and others of that era stated openly that they did not want a better educated populace because that might upset the low-wage labor market, and they certainly did not want a better educated black populace. Instead, money was being put into schools specifically to save a segregated system.

The brilliant legal NAACP litigation campaign led by Thurgood Marshall against segregated schools had been having success after success. The South Carolina governor and others wanted to preserve the “separate but equal” doctrine, but it took only a glance to see that black schools were seldom equal to white schools. Acting as if in panic, South Carolina started to put money into black school buildings in hopes of maintaining legal segregation. Not surprisingly, the initiative that on the surface seemed as if it were concerned with a better education, ended in the year that the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education holding that separate schools were inherently unequal. South Carolina and Beaufort County, where Hilton Head is located, fought integrated schools, and it was not until 1972, after my friend’s parents bought in Sea Pines, that the schools were integrated.

What existed outside the gates of Hilton Head resort communities when they were first developed was not just a segregated world, but also a poorly educated one. Before the new elementary school for black students was built in 1954, the kids attended one-room schools that dotted the island. It was not until that year that a black high school of any sort was available, and that was on the mainland. And since the bridge to the mainland was not yet opened, attending school on the mainland was hardly easy in 1954. Moreover, in the days of the one-room schoolhouses, the county only paid teachers to come to Hilton Head for three months each year. Perhaps by the time of Sea Pines development, children were being better educated beyond the gates than in previous generations, but all the existing adults had had almost no chance for a respectable education.

The Midwesterners, of course, had to have known of the segregated world they were moving into. Even the least socially and culturally aware people of the 1950s and 1960s had to realize a civil rights movement was underway. The migrants to Hilton Head, however, while well aware of segregation, may not have known about some of the work conditions on the island.

(Concluded on April 27.)

The bridge that opened in 1956 connecting Hilton Head to the mainland and the Sea Pines development on the island that also began in 1956 foretold the future of Hilton Head. It would be, and now is, a place filled with resort communities. The first golf course was built in 1960, and now there are many. The first Heritage Golf Classic, won by Arnold Palmer by three strokes, was played in 1960. Arnold also landed the first plane at the Hilton Head Airport, which opened in 1967. Also in 1967, Sea Pines first installed gates.

About 70% of the island is now located behind the gates of more than a dozen communities, often with “plantation” in their names. The developments have been eco-friendly, and beautiful trees and tasteful houses are everywhere. This was a place seeking to attract the affluent. At the beginning, these were primarily second homes. Primary homes were rare; people were not going to buy Hilton Head houses because of a nearby job. Second homes in general are for the affluent, and these spacious, well-constructed homes were not meant to attract the trailer-park crowd.

I tend to think of Hilton Head communities, at least at their inception, as having especially attracted the upper crust of small Midwest towns. My image may merely be because that described the parents of friends of mine who bought a place in Sea Pines in the 1960s. But even if that image of their hometown locations is wrong, it surely is correct that the it was the affluent who were buying into this place with large homes near the ocean. Those early development days promised a new community that offered explicitly and implicitly both a uniformity and a separation from the world. Architectural rules made sure that the color and size of houses would fall within a predictable range, and of course, the location of Hilton Head and the real estate prices held the promise that neighbors would be “much like us.” Gates made sure that “others” would not be allowed.

However, another world existed on Hilton Head when the Midwestern folk started buying land and houses behind the gates. I wonder if the new arrivals ever thought about that other Hilton Head. Behind the gates it was a de facto segregated world of the wealthy who were overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. Outside the gates was a continuation of a formally segregated, often impoverished Southern world, a world that may have been difficult for the affluent to understand. A couple of quotations come to mind.  Charles Pierre Péguy, the poet, said, “Short of genius, a rich man cannot imagine poverty.” Walter Bagehot, the journalist and essayist, said something similar: “Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.”

(Continued on April 25.)

As I thought about friends who owned pickup trucks and reflected on books about the economic and political divides in this country, I realized that I was focusing mostly on present-day America. I also knew, however, that divisions had been part of our history for a long time, and that many of us have been little concerned about them. A recent trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, had me thinking about this.

Hilton Head is a shoe-shaped, resort island twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, as the crow flies but not as the driver drives. (Query: Do crows invariably fly straight for twenty miles?) While there I heard much about the rich history of Hilton Head and the surrounding Lowcountry of which it is a part.

I already knew a little about the Lowcountry’s Gullah heritage from visits to Charleston, South Carolina, other coastal islands, from remarkable novels—Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Roots by Alex Haley, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall—and a memorable movie directed by Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, which was re-released a few years ago. All the novels and the movies utilize the striking Gullah story of Igbo (or Ibo) Landing.

I may have known a bit about the Gullahs, but I knew next to nothing about the rest of Hilton Head’s history. While there, I learned that the island in the antebellum era had about twenty plantations growing indigo and Sea Island cotton. The island, however, was an unpleasant place. Because of the prevalence of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever, the plantation owners did not live there. Slaves and overseers (the polite label, I suppose, for slave drivers) were the inhabitants.

The plantations were abandoned during the Civil War as a result of Sherman’s march to the sea, and large-scale farming operations did not return after Lee’s surrender. The few thousand inhabitants that remained on Hilton Head, almost all former slaves with little contact with the mainland, survived on subsistence farming, fishing, and oystering. Through the years, the population declined, and at the end of World War I an estimated 1,500 blacks and a few dozen whites lived on the island.

Change came to Hilton Head Island in the early twentieth century. Rich white men, largely from the north, began buying large tracts of land, which could be had at bargain prices, to be used for hunting preserves. By the 1930s two New York brothers-in-law owned 80% of the island while about 600 blacks still owned small plots on the island.

In addition, a few oyster factories were opened. Workers shucked oysters for canning. The shells were ground up for use as chicken feed and to make roads. Initially, blacks and whites, often Polish immigrants, worked side by side in the factories, but over time the workforce became largely black.

Land ownership again changed after World War II as acreage from the hunting preserves was sold to the newly-formed Hilton Head Company for logging. Hilton Head, however, remained a primitive and isolated place. Electricity first came to the island in 1950 and telephones only a few years later. Two truly transformative changes, however, came in 1956. A bridge to the mainland was opened, and Charles Fraser began developing what would be the Sea Pines community on one end of the island.

(Continued on April 23.)

As I thought about friends who owned pickup trucks and reflected on books about the economic and political divides in this country, I realized that I was focusing mostly on present-day America. I also knew, however, that divisions had been part of our history for a long time, and that many of us have been little concerned about them. A recent trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, had me thinking about this.

Hilton Head is a shoe-shaped, resort island twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, as the crow flies but not as the driver drives. (Query: Do crows invariably fly straight for twenty miles?) While there I heard much about the rich history of Hilton Head and the surrounding Lowcountry of which it is a part.

I already knew a little about the Lowcountry’s Gullah heritage from visits to Charleston, South Carolina, other coastal islands, from remarkable novels—Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Roots by Alex Haley, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall—and a memorable movie directed by Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, which was re-released a few years ago. All the novels and the movies utilize the striking Gullah story of Igbo (or Ibo) Landing.

I may have known a bit about the Gullahs, but I knew next to nothing about the rest of Hilton Head’s history. While there, I learned that the island in the antebellum era had about twenty plantations growing indigo and Sea Island cotton. The island, however, was an unpleasant place. Because of the prevalence of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever, the plantation owners did not live there. Slaves and overseers (the polite label, I suppose, for slave drivers) were the inhabitants.

The plantations were abandoned during the Civil War as a result of Sherman’s march to the sea, and large-scale farming operations did not return after Lee’s surrender. The few thousand inhabitants that remained on Hilton Head, almost all former slaves with little contact with the mainland, survived on subsistence farming, fishing, and oystering. Through the years, the population declined, and at the end of World War I an estimated 1,500 blacks and a few dozen whites lived on the island.

Change came to Hilton Head Island in the early twentieth century. Rich white men, largely from the north, began buying large tracts of land, which could be had at bargain prices, to be used for hunting preserves. By the 1930s two New York brothers-in-law owned 80% of the island while about 600 blacks still owned small plots on the island.

In addition, a few oyster factories were opened. Workers shucked oysters for canning. The shells were ground up for use as chicken feed and to make roads. Initially, blacks and whites, often Polish immigrants, worked side by side in the factories, but over time the workforce became largely black.

Land ownership again changed after World War II as acreage from the hunting preserves was sold to the newly-formed Hilton Head Company for logging. Hilton Head, however, remained a primitive and isolated place. Electricity first came to the island in 1950 and telephones only a few years later. Two truly transformative changes, however, came in 1956. A bridge to the mainland was opened, and Charles Fraser began developing what would be the Sea Pines community on one end of the island.

(Continued on April 23.)

As I thought about friends who owned pickup trucks and reflected on books about the economic and political divides in this country, I realized that I was focusing mostly on present-day America. I also knew, however, that divisions had been part of our history for a long time, and that many of us have been little concerned about them. A recent trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, had me thinking about this.

Hilton Head is a shoe-shaped, resort island twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, as the crow flies but not as the driver drives. (Query: Do crows invariably fly straight for twenty miles?) While there I heard much about the rich history of Hilton Head and the surrounding Lowcountry of which it is a part.

I already knew a little about the Lowcountry’s Gullah heritage from visits to Charleston, South Carolina, other coastal islands, from remarkable novels—Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Roots by Alex Haley, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall—and a memorable movie directed by Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, which was re-released a few years ago. All the novels and the movies utilize the striking Gullah story of Igbo (or Ibo) Landing.

I may have known a bit about the Gullahs, but I knew next to nothing about the rest of Hilton Head’s history. While there, I learned that the island in the antebellum era had about twenty plantations growing indigo and Sea Island cotton. The island, however, was an unpleasant place. Because of the prevalence of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever, the plantation owners did not live there. Slaves and overseers (the polite label, I suppose, for slave drivers) were the inhabitants.

The plantations were abandoned during the Civil War as a result of Sherman’s march to the sea, and large-scale farming operations did not return after Lee’s surrender. The few thousand inhabitants that remained on Hilton Head, almost all former slaves with little contact with the mainland, survived on subsistence farming, fishing, and oystering. Through the years, the population declined, and at the end of World War I an estimated 1,500 blacks and a few dozen whites lived on the island.

Change came to Hilton Head Island in the early twentieth century. Rich white men, largely from the north, began buying large tracts of land, which could be had at bargain prices, to be used for hunting preserves. By the 1930s two New York brothers-in-law owned 80% of the island while about 600 blacks still owned small plots on the island.

In addition, a few oyster factories were opened. Workers shucked oysters for canning. The shells were ground up for use as chicken feed and to make roads. Initially, blacks and whites, often Polish immigrants, worked side by side in the factories, but over time the workforce became largely black.

Land ownership again changed after World War II as acreage from the hunting preserves was sold to the newly-formed Hilton Head Company for logging. Hilton Head, however, remained a primitive and isolated place. Electricity first came to the island in 1950 and telephones only a few years later. Two truly transformative changes, however, came in 1956. A bridge to the mainland was opened, and Charles Fraser began developing what would be the Sea Pines community on one end of the island.

(Continued on April 23.)

He was a journalist who wrote articles for the website of a cable news network. I asked him about the liberalism of his fellow journalists. He said that there were more non-liberals on the staff than many might think, but even so, the journalists were mainly liberals. Many of the staff did that popular quiz or drinking game after Donald Trump won: How many of us know someone who owns a pickup truck? How many know someone who owns a gun? Have you listened to a country song this week? Of course, these questions are meant to illustrate how out of touch the media and other coastal, liberal elites are from the segment of the country that elected our President.

I had a number of different reactions to what he said. One had me wondering about the one-sided nature of this game. The diehard Trumpistas are a minority that supposedly feel alienated and overlooked by much of America. That, perhaps, should lead them to thinking about the sources of their alienation, but I haven’t heard of them asking each other: Have you listened to NPR this week? Have you looked at the New Yorker recently? Have you read a novel this year? Do you know anyone who drives a hybrid? Does this supposedly alienated group ever introspectively explore the grounds that separates them from other Americans?

The questions that the journalists asked of themselves are predicated on the belief that there has been a massive shift of white, blue-collar folks towards Trumpian conservative policies. I also wondered about that. Maybe there has been some change, but perhaps it has been overstated. If there has been a shift, it did not lead to a majority, or even a plurality, for Donald Trump. That fact should cast doubt on the supposed sudden, massive blue-collar flight to the right. In fact, Trump got almost the same percentage of the popular vote as Mitt Romney did four years earlier. This hardly indicates a seismic change in the electorate. If more of the white, blue-collar demographic did vote for Trump than had voted for Romney, then an equivalent sized group who had voted conservatively four years before did not vote for Trump. If we talk about groups that gravitated to the conservative candidate, why aren’t we also talking about those who moved away from the conservatives?

And, of course, any rightward shift of white, blue-collar voters has not been sudden. It has been underway for a long time, since at least Nixon’s southern strategy.

The discussion also led me to think about a couple of books I have recently read which should be in the canon for anyone interested in understanding blue-collar America—Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild and Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein. In 2008, General Motors shut down a Chevrolet plant that employed 4,000 people in Janesville, Wisconsin. Local companies supplying the GM plant also close, compounding the effect of GM’s closure. Goldstein, a Washington Post writer, chronicles the effects the closings had on the city of 68,000. With the loss of $28-an-hour jobs, many families dropped from a comfortable middle-class life to one with not enough food or clothing. Other families were disrupted because some spent the work week far from home working in still-functioning GM factories. Some of the laid-off people found new jobs in Janesville, but the pay was usually much less than what they had made before. Depression and shame haunted those who remained out of work or worked for reduced wages.

The book does not propose remedies for what happened, but it does indicate that a favorite remedy of many—job retraining—was not successful. On average those who sought new jobs without retraining earned more than those who went through formal retraining programs. Amy Goldstein states, “The evidence is thin that job training in the United States is an effective way to lead laid-off workers back into solid employment.”

Goldstein does not indicate that Janesville’s travails brought a sudden shift to the right by the white working class. Chronicling the political upheavals in the country is not her goal. However, the book does illustrate the impact that corporate decisions can have on individuals and communities and that the individuals and the community are largely powerless to affect those decisions. (Janesville is Paul Ryan’s hometown. He was not able to keep General Motors there. There is no suggestion in the book that if Ayn Rand principles were followed everything would have been hunky-dory.)

Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, on the other hand, spent years in Louisiana’s Tea Party country to try to understand this brand of rightwing voters. She sees paradoxes in these conservatives. They maintain the country is better off with less government, but Hochschild notes that by almost all measures people in red states are worse off than those in blue states. She concentrates on what she sees as one great paradox: Pollution has directly and severely harmed many of these conservatives, but they still oppose environmental regulation. They prefer to live with the aftermath of pollution to having the government trying to prevent it. As one of them says, “Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism.”

In her sensitive, affectionate portrayal of these people in rural Louisiana, she also makes several telling points about our present political divisions. First, she notes that the left has not moved further left in the last generation or so, but that the right has veered sharply right. She also has the important insight that for the Left, the flashpoint is up the social ladder. Thus, the Occupy Wall Street Movement focused on “the one percent” and increasing income inequality. For the Right, the flashpoint is between the middle class and the poor. The conservatives focus on they perceive as undeserved and munificent breaks given to those below them on the economic scale. As a result of these different flashpoints, the Left examines the private sector; the Right the public.

(Continued on April 20.)

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

“I am by trade and calling an Americanist, and I believe, contrary to much current academic opinion, that America is a special case in the development of the West.” Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s.

“Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.” George Orwell, Animal Farm.

“When Charles Lodwick observed in 1692 that New York City was ‘too great a mixture of nations and English the least part,’ he was articulating the sentiments of not only an influential group of contemporaries but scores of later commentators who believed that ethnic diversity threatened the social fabric.” Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664-1730.

“History has failed us, but no matter.” Min Jin Lee, Pachinko.

“I don’t usually name my trucks but this one I call Mona, after the sound she makes when I push her toward her top speed.” Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Street and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City.

“The gravel pit was about a mile east of town, and the size of a small lake, and so deep that boys under sixteen were forbidden by their parents to swim there.” William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

“It was Super Bowl Sunday, the only day of the year my mother served dinner in front of the television set.” Michael J. Agovino, The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City.

“Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron.” Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

“A.R. bet he was going to die.” David Pietrusza, Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series.

“There’s likely some polished way of starting a story like this, a clear bit of gaming that’d sucker people in surer than the best banco feeler in town.”  Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness.