"It all turns on affection."

Wendell Berry is a longball hitter!

Berry is an underappreciated genius. As a retired professor of American Lit writing his memoir, I'm reminded I spent thirty years of teaching followed by thirty years of alternative journalism warning citizens that our toxic politics and plutocratic economics unfit us for an effectively egalitarian democracy.

I warned my students and readers that a people who don't cherish their great writers (for example Walt and Emily) eventually lose their minds. That's our current fate.

It will not be easy to extricate ourselves from going on three centuries of such abuse.