"Men are not hanged for stealing horses," George Savile, the marquess of Halifax, wrote in his Reflections, "but that horses may not be stolen."
Were I to ask you to start naming Dr. Seuss books go ahead: The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas . . . I believe you would name as many as you could name Hop on Pop, The Lorax, Horton Hears a Who and never get to my favorite.
Late Tuesday, backers of the city's first high school catering to gay and lesbian students withdrew their proposal for the time being. Good. The special school is a bad idea, and not just because the name -- "The Social Justice Solidarity High School" -- sounds like something Kim Il Jong would establish in Pyongyang.
A love story between a "lonely cripple" and a "liquor-guzzling slut," set against a backdrop of drug addiction, gambling, murder, mangled syntax and inescapable poverty whose sweetest moment, the opening number "Summertime," is a lullaby sung to a baby who will pass through the hands of three mothers before the play is over.
The problem with grasping a crisis is that while it's going on all over, it can still seem contradicted by localized events -- thus, on every cool day in July, those ideologically opposed to the idea of global warming get to shout, "See? Fifty-nine degrees in July -- some warming, huh?"
The word "politics" comes from the Greek "polis," meaning city, and it is an irony of American politics that our cities tend to get the backhand. No candidate hesitates to stand in a cornfield and declare that he will bring this nation back to its cherished small-town roots. But what politician holds a photo-op beside a chain-link fence on a gritty urban block and endorses the values of the hardworking bus driver? Very few.
