As I say, I live part-time in New Orleans where there is so much more spirit of community that it puts what goes on in the rest of America kind of in dramatic relief. People aren't different but the circumstances that they are in as living arrangements tend to either push them toward more of that or less of that.

You see a yearning to get more of that again in these Main Street-style malls that are being built, which are trying to summon the semblance or a simulacrum of community without actually the essence of it. So there's clearly a feeling that we need more of this but we don't know how to get it at this point. "Let's all read the same book" is as close as we can come.

And wear the same clothes, and drink the same coffee. Yet you've bemoaned the lack of a Starbucks in an airport when you're stuck there for an hour and a half waiting for your luggage.

I sure do. Because Starbucks is not the problem. The problem is the fact that the only place in town where people sit for any length of time and maybe talk to each other is Starbucks. That's the problem. The problem is that Starbucks filled a hole -- Starbucks didn't invent that hole. There might not be so many Starbucks if there were more plazas, if there were places that older cities discovered were good ideas for people to hang out, where they don't have to spend $3 to get in.

Let's go to Enron. What if Enron had never existed?

It's this weird cycle. It's hard to remember back to the beginning of the '90s, oddly enough, when everybody was sort of shaking themselves like wet dogs after the go-go cycle of the '80s. The materialist, greed-is-good, Michael Milken-fueled '80s saying, "Whew, we're not going to do that again." Then within three years, we did it all again, so much bigger and so much grander, at the loss of so much more money to so many more people.

It just makes you kind of tremble at the thought of what lies ahead for us two years from now, when we've kind of shaken this off and gone, "Whew, we're not going to do that again." I think the four least believable words in American public life are, "once and for all." When you hear a politician say, "once and for all," you know he's lying. It's going to happen again.

So our problem is a short memory?

Well, that is the American gift, you know -- to have a short memory. Hence, Jimmy Swaggart can make a comeback. Anybody can make a comeback, anybody can make three comebacks in this country. Why I like California is because this is the personal reinvention capital of the world. It's got the shortest memory span because it's got the least things to remember.

Any shocking comebacks?

Start with Ted Kennedy, that's a favorite of the conservatives. Jimmy Swaggart, who is now a fairly successful gospel singer. Jim Bakker gets out of jail and goes right back to a ministry. The guys who don't do well in this country are the guys who don't figure out that you just have to fall on your knees and go, "I am so sorry." And then you get to do whatever you want after that.

That's sort of the formula. It's why, for example, the Protestant clergy who misbehave get it, because this is a formula that sort of comes out of the Protestant experience, whereas the Catholic pedophile priests don't get it and end up being protected for years and then reviled. But they never realize, that -- well, pedophilia is not something you can apologize for anyway. Whole different category of event. We'll drop that ...

Let's get back to politics. How about Dick Cheney having to hand over documents about his energy task force and policies? A step in the right direction?

If you live long enough, one of the rewards is to get the privilege of seeing each political cliché mouthed in turn by partisans from each side. So that the same people who were desperately demanding that we know chapter and verse about Hillary Clinton's top-secret healthcare task force are now saying, "No, no, no, confidentiality, it's an important principle." And vice versa.

It explains why, or it's a consequence of the fact that most of our politicians are trained as lawyers. Because that's exactly what lawyers are trained to do: Take this side, all right, now take this side. That's what they do. And anybody who thinks that they're doing anything else is welcome to bid for some Enron stock certificates on eBay, because that is the game.

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