“America’s pretty violent and repressive these days. But as my pal Skeeter Washington might put it, it’s a ‘bouncy’ violence, a ‘bouncy’ repression, often ribboned with exuberance and cheer. Believe it or not, America’s a very insecure country. It’s been scared into a kind of self-imposed subjugation first by the imagined threat of Communism and then by the imagined threat of drugs. Maestra calls us an ‘abusive democracy,’ one in which everybody wants to control everybody else. Lately, even tolerance, itself, has been usurped by the sanctimonious and the opportunistic, and turned into an
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