qotd: weekend edition!

"...America, in its public and official face, has become more foreign to me by the day--which wouldn't be worth reporting, except that the sentiment is largely shared by so many Americans. The grammar and vocabulary of the language spoken by the administration and by a large part of the press differ so fundamentally from that spoken by people in my intellectual, political, and, as it happens, geographical neighborhood [Seattle] that debate between the two has become like the Englishman's idea of speaking a foreign language, which is to shout ever more loudly in his own. There's no possible negotiation between a phrase like 'freedom and democracy on the march' and its cognate in the other language, 'murderous chaos to which there is no foreseeable end.'"

~ Jonathan Raban, "September 11: The View from the West," New York Review of Books