I have made excellent use of this quarantine thing by plowing through some great classic works of literature that I had never gotten around to reading. First it was Middlemarch, then The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and just last night I finished, Anna Karenina. While it's true that great big old Russian novels, particularly anything by Tolstoy, can be thickly ponderous things, I thought Anna was brilliant. The old weirdo could write, my friends. There’s a scene in the book where he describes a group of peasants and himself mowing a field of tall grass with scythes. The writing is so beautifully rendered you can smell the grass, hear the sweep of the blade and feel the tightness in your back and shoulders by the time he is through. Incredible.
Then, while scanning through some business news articles—something I don’t recommend—I stumble across a piece in The Atlantic that informs me that not only should I feel appropriate shame and guilt for my white privilege, my stable family privilege, my wealth privilege and all the rest, now there’s another privilege for me to confess to...flour privilege!! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, it would appear that we have bought up practically every pound of processed wheat left in America for the purposes of satisfying our baking itch. In so doing I suppose we have hogged it all and now there’s a shortage of flour. If it weren’t for that British Baking Show, we wouldn’t be acting this way. I’m not kidding y’all. This is a real thing...
One thing that we will never run out of in this country? Things to feel guilty about, worry about and fret over. There will always be some new fresh catastrophe right around the corner to feed our ulcers. We will never, ever exhaust the raw materials from which our anxieties are manufactured. It is an infinitely renewable resource.
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