Lewis Lapham's Tree Stand Gag

Friday evening I heard Harpers editor Lewis Lapham on National Public Radio expressing considerable amusement at the news that 36% of Georgia hunting injuries are caused by falls from tree stands. He went on to explain - almost too predictably to be true - that he had come down from New York, knew little about hunting, and had no idea people hunted from trees.

I know some of the disabled survivors of such accidents, but I also know that they are the last people who would want me to deliver some humorless, victimist harangue on cultural sensitivity. So I will merely note that if there are people out there in NPR-land who shared the journalists' hilarity, they should not be surprised if certain people laugh at them next time they break their necks skiing, die of some recreationally-acquired disease, or choke on their pesto or whatever it is they eat these days.

Our respective classes, regions and races are united by a common government, and of course we all live cheek-by-jowl in the Washington area, but such encounters suggest that we share less recognition of any common membership in the human race than do the Serbs and Croats, or the Arabs and Jews. Our cultural civil war produces a mutual contempt and fear which is far more intimately felt, and more convenient for politicians, than any practical political issues. I now understand why so many people who should know better are moved by the flattery of David Duke and George Bush, who tell them that they are "real people." They suspect that beneath its folksy veneer, the Democratic party is still dominated by the agenda of an imperious caste that thinks we are not real people.

John Crouch
Arlington, Virginia