We fear death so badly we've let our very souls become climate controlled. In the old days it took twice as long to get from one town to another, but it was interesting, the drive was interesting. People live in this terror that if they get off the superhighway they're doomed. And everything feeds it. Fluorescent light feeds it.
Plastic feeds it.
McDonald's feeds it. His weighty new book has a weighty title, The Time of Our Time . It is a very personal, very political anthology. The author has arranged excerpts from his works into Maileresque history, starting with Ernest Hemingway in a boxing ring, continuing through bullfights, antiwar protests and political conventions, going back to the ancient Middle East and then sailing off into the cosmos. He wants the book to be read as a novel, and if the story line gets lost in the sands of Egypt, the message survives.