Reporters Thrive On The World's Misfortune. For

Scientists Have Been Struck By The Fact That Things That Break Down Virtually Never Get Lost, While Things That Get Lost Hardly Ever Break Down.

The Only Thing I Was Fit For Was To Be A Writer, And This Notion Rested Solely On My Suspicion That I Would Never Be Fit For Real Work, And That Writing Didn't Require Any.

Notice, For Example, That People Who Talk About "the Joys Of Childhood" Are Always Adults. Only An Adult, Utterly Remote From The Reality Of Childhood, Could Suppose It Is Time Of Joys.

We Honor Ambition, We Reward Greed, We Celebrate Materialism, We Worship Acquisitiveness, We Commercialize Art, We Cherish Success And Then We Bark At The Young About The Gentle Arts Of The Spirit. The Kids Know That If We Really Valued Learning, We Would Pay Our Teachers What We Pay Our Lawyers And Stockbrokers. If We Valued Art, We Would Not Measure It By Its Capacity To Produce Profits. If We Regarded Literature As Important, We Would Remove It From The Celebrity Sweepstakes And Spend A Little Money On Our Libraries.

Strategic Thinkers Were Naturally Rattled To Find This Outsider Fooling Around With Their Work. They Had Been Thinking Strategically When Reagan Was Just Another Movie Actor Playing Opposite A Chimpanzee, For Heaven's Sake. They Think Reagan Is Too Naive, Too Innocent, To Grasp The Intellectual Complexities Of Cold War Strategy.