Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.

Louis Armstrong playing trumpet on the Judgment Day.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.

The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.