The protests against GWB’s inauguration last Saturday [January 20, 2001] were the largest since the anti-Nixon rallies on inauguration day in 1973, the press has informed us. But a lot of newspaper and TV reporters have been pretending not to understand why so many of us were standing in the cold rain in Washington, chanting and waving placards and booing when the dignitaries rolled by Freedom Plaza.

There are, it seems, people even in this country, even in this century, who honestly, unironically believe that there is an intelligent, self-conscious force above and beyond humanity and that this force — generally thought of as male, and generally called God — has a will that it exercises over us and everything in the universe. (2000.09.01)