Coping Strategies

Six weeks into the most modern of conflicts, contemporary war seemed to exhibit the vulgarity (in this sense, universality) that Oscar Wilde said would be needed to make warfare unpopular. The opening offensive was directed at the ordinary, the workaday, the commonplace. And common people, not self-exalted jihad warriors, are showing the bravery and making the sacrifices—in Afghanistan as well as in the United States.

Then, in a more Wildean sense of the word "vulgar," there's the anthrax. A cowflop of a weapon has elicited all sorts of bull in response. On October 20 the Los Angeles Times devoted 465 column inches to a disease that had sickened fewer people (some press reports would claim) than the corporation that makes the antibiotic by which the disease is cured. Only five months ago Bayer withdrew the anti-cholesterol drug Baycol after it had been linked to fifty-two deaths. Fortunately, my family doctor, ...