KOK Edit: Your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM)
KOK Edit: your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM) KOK Edit: your favorite copyeditor since 1984(SM) Katharine O'Moore Klopf
Blog

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

State of Illusion

I'm playing Beat the Clock today, as I absolutely must ship out a rush project today, but I'm taking a short break to send you to Anna Quindlen's excellent column in the February 6 issue of Newsweek about the real state of the union:

"My fellow Americans, the state of the Union is ... "

Confident. Strong. Stronger than ever.

Dire. Disturbing. Disastrous.

Those last three are the ones the speechwriter will never use. But at the moment they're far closer to the truth. ...

The young, the poor, the outsourced, the uneducated, the overqualified: so many Americans have this sense of profound malaise. Of course, that's the ailment that dare not speak its name (and not just because the word is French); look what happened to Jimmy Carter when he dared to talk of a national "crisis of confidence." He found himself traded in for the so-much-cheerier "morning in America."

It's not morning. It's not even afternoon. There's not much union in the state, just one fissure after another. ...

[Read more.]




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Michael Moore's looking for health care horror stories: http://michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=193 or http://tinyurl.com/93s5q

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf said...

Thanks, Anon. I've already written him with my story.

Template created by Makeworthy Media