posted March 16, 2003 at 10:00 AM MDT
Only in America
by Norman Mailer
[final paragraph]
"For those of the rest of us who are not going to depend on the power of prayer, we will do well to find the rampart we can defend over what may be dire years to come. Democracy, I would repeat, is the noblest form of government we have yet evolved, and we may as well begin to ask ourselves whether we are ready to suffer, even perish for it, rather than readying ourselves to live in the lower existence of a monumental banana republic with a government always eager to cater to mega-corporations as they do their best to appropriate our thwarted dreams with their elephantiastical conceits."
Norman Mailer's Commonwealth Club speech in San Francisco
February 20, 2003
The New York Review of Books: Only in America