Qu'est-ce qu'un cendrier iii: The President's assonant embrace

                  We can give a man his reason for

                  decency but we can not surrender

                  ours. If there is an exhaustion

                  in America with the spectacle of

                  sanctimony's cruelty, it has not

                  come from the spectacle of satir-

                  ic sexuality. It has come because

                  genocide was seen, and judged to

                  be too high a price for schaden-

                  freude. I know this and you know

                  this; and while we might delight

                  in the President's endearing sim-

                  iles and smile at simple recitals

                  from our history, no one can turn

                  a page of it with a greeting card

                  obliviousness, to those who fell

                  too near and too well to have lost.

                  But the President's negligent con-
                  descensions lost even this excuse
                  of flattery, in his grotesque mis-
                  constructions of the Equal Protec-
                  tion Clause. We are likely to have
                  to visit them, given the gravity
                  his enemies are only too glad to
                  heap upon a rhetorical spectacle
                  of advanced laziness.

                  For now, it is simply urgent to 
                  affirm that there would be no con-
                  stituency to be so lazily blessed, 
                  if the government of the United
                  States had not elected itself re-
                  peatedly on its unprecedented and
                  unequalled suffering.

          

ashtray in glass with poinsettia

  photography Laurent