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Salon
Salon
Politics
Gregory D. Foster

Can we heal the house divided?

They're rioting in Africa. They're starving in Spain.
There's hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans. The Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch.
And I don't like anybody very much!

Unless you are so disturbingly young as to be irredeemably challenged culturally, perhaps you “remember” the foregoing words from the Kingston Trio’s 1959 hit song, “The Merry Minuet”? How quaint it is that these words so exquisitely capture the moment now before us in the United States, where nobody likes anybody very much.

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