Democracy can’t survive if we can’t trust our institutions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We’ll come back to that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Steamed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In Tom Wolfe’s 1987 satire Bonfire of the Vanities<\/em>, a young black man is run over by a car driven y a millionaire bond trader. A Bronx DA and couple of New York cops investigate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In one part of the story, a huckster minister, clearly modeled after Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or some such, explains his role in the community to the investigators. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In his metaphor, community anger is “steam”, building inexorably as the heat rises, ready to blow the boiler sky high if something isn’t done. That “something”, naturally, is the good reverend plying his services, as a “steam valve”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For a price. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The book was head, shoulders and ankles better than the movie – a box office bomb that nearly ended Tom Hanks as an A-lister, thirty years back – but this scene more or less gets the point across:<\/p>\n\n\n\n