We all hope. It's what keeps us alive. - David Mamet

Somebody told you, and you hold it as an article of faith, that higher education is an unassailable good. This notion is so dear to you that when I question it you become angry. Good. Good, I say. Are not those the very things which we should question? I say college education, since the war, has become so a matter of course, and such a fashionable necessity, for those either of or aspiring to to the new vast middle class, that we espouse it, as a matter of right, and have ceased to ask, “What is it good for?” (Pause)

Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”?

The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease — the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right,” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts,” who can never be proved wrong.

It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach,” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well,” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.

As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.