I belong to the last generation of college students who wrote their term papers on a typewriter—for one year. By the time I entered my sophomore year, I was writing on a word processor; by the time I graduated, I was staring into the blue-grey screen of a Macintosh.
In spite of our common progress, the country is still beset by the consequences of our original sin: lingering racial prejudice and outright bias, and deep distrust between Americans of different races and between large swaths of our citizenry and those charged with protecting and serving them.
One bomb had exploded in Manhattan; perhaps there was a second. Some injuries, no fatalities. Within 10 minutes or so, most of the customers were back where they started: enjoying the evening, almost as if nothing had happened.
Deconstructionists, those intellectuals who make it their job to ask critical questions about our long-cherished collective stories, like to ask, among other things, who or what cause is best served by a given narrative. They might ask, for example, whose interests are served by a story that tells o