"...My dad, may he rest in peace, taught me many wonderful things. And one of the things he taught me was never ask a guy what you do for a living. … - David Mamet

Patel?!?! Ravadahm Patel?!?! How am I going to make a living on these deadbeat wogs?! Where'd you get this from, a morgue? Oh come on! What's the fuckin' point?! What's the fuckin' point in any case!? I gotta argue with you? I gotta knock heads with the cops? I'm busting my balls, sell your dirt to two deadbeats; money in a mattress. I come back, you can't even keep the contracts safe. I got to go out and close them again. What the fuck am I wasting my time... Fuck this shit!

Many of us, and most of us from time to time, try to escape a blunt fact which may not tally with our self-image. When we are depressed, we re-create the world around us to rationalize our mood. We are then likely to overlook or misinterpret happy circumstances.

As a youth I enjoyed — indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered — the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system — which is to say by the accrual of wealth — house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.