I have been spending my afternoons of late contemplating the curious machinery of the American mind, which is a contraption of such marvelous and contradictory gears that it would make a Swiss watchmaker take to his bed with a permanent headache. We are a people of high ideals and low thresholds for discomfort, a nation that keeps a Bible on the nightstand and a ledger under the pillow, and we manage to balance the two without ever letting the right hand know what the left is embezzling.

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