It Takes A Man To Suffer Ignorance And Smile

Back in February, Paul Berger, whose blog is titled An Englishman In New York, was surprised at how ubiqituous the greeting “How are you?” seems in the Big Apple. To place the phrase into some sort of historical perspective, I linked to David Gelernter’s wonderful City Journal retrospective from the mid-1990s of Manhattan mores on the cusp of World War II:

Nineteen thirty-nine lived in an ” ought” culture. We inhabit more of a “want” culture, a desire-not-obligation culture. One of the most obvious and important consequences of the slow death between 1939 and today of American civic religion