The booty is in beauty parlors. You have been searching for tranquility, we have reflections. May I brush your hook? Buff your pegleg? Tattoo your bald top? Cold tushee. Yesterday's inspired sermon has gone soggy as cornflakes in a bowl of coffee. The slaughter three months from now in Peking has already disheartened the little boy in the third row of desks. His teacher, who died of gangrene in Viet Nam, might have been that boy, had he lived in another time, another place. He could have been the first to swallow bullets in Tiananmen Square. He could have been the baby boy my wife and I lost years ago in Massachusetts.

-- Michael West