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Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table
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from: Marjorie Williams

Thou Swell

Posted Monday, July 20, 1998, at 4:56 PM ET

Dear Tim,

But you're forgetting Rudy Giuliani, who does think the world (or at least New York) would be better off with a touch of the Amish. I indulged myself in the New York Post today, since the Washington Post never arrived in Princeton. Its top story is Giuliani's crackdown, under a new city ordinance, on sex shops and porn video stores. The headline: PORN SHOPS REACH DATE OF XXXPIRATION.

I didn't literally mean that the Marines are like the Amish. But don't you think that to the average American of our generation (we're both 40), military life is almost as impossibly Other as the life that David Remnick's piece described? I took this to be one of Tom's points, too--that the great divide is as much a function of our common social agreement, in the post-draft era, to regard military service as the province of a small subculture, as it is of the Marines' decision to work as a culture apart.

I'm signing off for today. I could spin quite a long meditation on what my mother saw in Mrs. Wilcox--which was always a source of mystery and frustration to me, when it was clearly so much better to be Margaret Schlegel or even, if it came to that, her passionate sister Helen. But that's a topic for another day.

In haste,

Marjorie

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Marjorie Williams

Thou Swell

Posted Monday, July 20, 1998, at 4:56 PM ET
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Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Marjorie Williams is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
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