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The president of the National Pork Producers Council — the person who represents the people who represent the nation's pigs — appeared recently before Congress to talk about sales in the swine flu era.
"Those who will come after us will be as wise as we are, and as able to take care of themselves as we have been," Thomas Jefferson said in 1811.
The guy who runs the planet's latest G-20 summit city made an illuminating remark as he welcomed the world to his front door.
For the world, apparently, eight is no longer enough.
The Falk Laboratory School, a little gray brick building atop a hill in Pittsburgh's Oakland section, overlooks a heart-stopping vista of the city that unfurls straight down to the Monongahela River. This was my elementary school, and the song we sang about it in music class featured this line: "Above a city of bridges and steel, of rivers and mill fires burning."
After the last G-20, President Barack Obama pronounced it "a very productive summit." You can also call these blink-and-they're-gone meetings lots of other things: A really expensive image boost. The high-level economic equivalent of a season of "24." A fraternity rush mixer for the people who run the planet.
The images seem contradictory, somehow: A town with a vibrant, textured story to tell welcomes the world — and the once-in-a-generation opportunity to raise its profile — by turning itself into a phantom-zone fortress of boarded-up storefronts, roadblocks and big men with big guns.
"Wish upon a star," Jiminy Cricket, Disney's arthropod muse, likes to say.
"And that's the way it is," he'd say. It wasn't, but we wanted that reassurance. The idea that someone could wrangle the world each night and boil it down to a sensible, digestible half hour was so comforting.
On July 22, 1969, barely 48 hours after a human being first stepped onto the moon's surface, a community in Pittsburgh's western suburbs called Moon Township had a parade, as suburban communities do.
"I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others," one of Michael Jackson's closest friends said on Twitter this week. "I cannot be part of the public whoopla."
A record-shattering vinyl album and its moonwalking maestro. A paper poster of a golden-haired beauty in a one-piece swimsuit that was gossamer and clingy in all the right places.
Look at me. Look at my life, my body, my antics, my kids, my home. It's OK — come on in. It's a fair deal: I'm getting famous, you're getting entertained. Everybody's happy. What's the problem?
Through the voices of its people, the map shouts.
There's a moment in one particularly silly episode of the original "Star Trek" that is, despite its camp, quite stirring. Captain James T. Kirk, on a distant planet that somehow developed into a twisted parallel America, rises to recite the preamble of the U.S. Constitution in a way that only William Shatner could.
Pause and consider for a moment what we can now do in America.
Decades ago, a joke about the country's 34th president went like this: Did you hear about the new Eisenhower doll? Wind it up and it stands still for eight years.
Friday night in northern New Jersey, circa April 2009, offers clues to prove any theory about the American economic meltdown, depending on what you want to believe. Just like so many places these days.
Does the name Byran Uyesugi ring a bell? Odds are not. What about Robert A. Hawkins? Or Mark Barton? Terry Ratzmann? Robert Stewart?
He came and he saw, but he didn't play the conqueror. Instead, Barack Obama journeyed to Europe, as he put it, to pay attention.
"The better the villain," Alfred Hitchcock said, "the better the movie." And in the epic production that is the United States of America, we have followed that advice since the earliest settlers landed. For every hero the American story factory produces, a vivid new villain comes off the assembly line in short order.
The first thing you see is the enormous boot.
When times get tough, big ideas happen. "In a crisis," John F. Kennedy said, "be aware of the danger — but recognize the opportunity."
At a harrowing national moment, Franklin D. Roosevelt commandeered the young airwaves for a "fireside chat" with the American people — a candid talk about big troubles and how to fix them. He was confident and strong, a father figure to a nation that was losing its way.
Each dawn through the 1950s and into the 1960s, he would emerge from the house on North Delaware Street and amble through town in suit and Stetson hat, a snowy-haired Midwestern retiree on a morning constitutional to the library where he volunteered.
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