And they felt Borat was insulting?
It’s the end of the world and all of western civilization
I got my breakfast (black coffee and a blueberry muffin) at a truck-stop Dunkin Donuts on the way to my office. As I was walking out, I passed a woman. She was in her early 40s, not quite haggardly thin, with dark hair and a face pockmarked like Sadie Burke. She carried a canvas purse and a pack of cigarettes.
She stepped past me to a man sitting at a table and asked in a thin voice, “Are you going west?”
“No,” he said. “Where you headed?”
“California.”
The Challenge of Forgetting
George Will’s mother died at 98, after a long period of dementia. He wrote a very touching tribute to her, while exploring the ravages of the long process (alliteration notwithstanding):
Dementia, that stealthy thief of identity, had bleached her vibrant self almost to indistinctness, like a photograph long exposed to sunlight.
It is said that God gave us memory so we could have roses in winter. Dementia is an ever-deepening advance of wintry whiteness, a protracted paring away of personality. It inflicts on victims the terror of attenuated personhood, challenging philosophic and theological attempts to make death a clean, intelligible and bearable demarcation.
(I know, I know: two Will links in two days? Sue me.)