Sublime

hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.

Wright did not see himself as a washed-up case. He must have looked and sounded like the past, the shadow of Grosvenor Cleveland’s America. But he was vital, energetic. He had long believed that an honest arrogance was preferable to a hypocritical modesty. From criticism, he took combative inspiration.

They’d been covering the radicals and the hippies so much that now his viewers couldn’t see past them. The gray areas had ceased to exist. And old Cronkite had two thoughts about this. First, anyone who thinks television can bring the nation together to have a real dialogue and begin to understand one another with empathy and compassion is sufferin

“We don’t know that for sure. What we do know is that the media is now covering this Roy Cooper like he’s our own, homegrown George Zimmerman. Like he got mugged once, so now he’s out there on some kind of vendetta.”

The latest story concerned Hemingway’s knocking a man down for calling him a big fat slob. “You can call me a slob,” Hemingway had said, “but you can’t call me a big fat slob.” Then he struck him down. The natives of Bimini set the incident to music, and if they were sure Hemingway was not within earshot, they would sing in a calypso beat, “The big