I have got way behind with email, am struggling to catch up. Had several emails about my saying that reading George Will’s Wal-Mart column started a chain of thought that ended up at Brave New World. Several readers were baffled–this one for e.g. (Who, for reasons I cannot fathom, addresses me as “Tovarich.” Note for future reference, Sir: Since Chinese communism is more my beat, “Tong-zhi” would be more appropriate.)

“I have been trying to somehow connect the George Will column, Wal-Mart, & BNW. Was this something like a math quiz problem? Not an expert about any of the three, though a fan of them all, the connection seems just out of reach. Will your readers get the answer in The September Diary?”

Well, if I go into too much detail here I shall get into trouble of the PC sort; but the main idea was, that any society ought to offer useful and productive lives to its epsilons–i.e. to citizens over on the left-hand side of the Bell Curve. The postindustrial West has been depressingly bad at this. Our basic approach to our low-IQ fellow citizens has been “Let them eat cake.” It’s hard not to get the impression that we have been busily building a society of law-school elites, by law-school elites, and for law-school elites–the “Yale or jail” society. Wal-Mart, with its simplified, stripped-down training programs that concentrate on a few easily-mastered skills and disciplines, is a small reversal of this deplorable (to my mind) trend.

Whatever you think of the society imagined in Brave New World, at least there was a place for everyone in it, bright or dim. That is not the case with present-day Western society, except in pockets like Wal-Mart.