Barack Obama describes New York City in the early 1980s.

With the Wall Street boom, Manhattan was humming, new developments were cropping up everywhere; men and women barely out of their twenties already enjoying ridiculous wealth, the fashion merchants fast on their heels. The beauty, the filth, the noise and the excess, all of it dazzled my senses; there seemed no constraints on originality of lifestyles or the manufacture of desire – a more expensive restaurant, a finer suit of clothes, a more exclusive nightspot, a more beautiful woman, a more potent high. Uncertain of my ability to steer a course of moderation, fearful of falling into old habits, I took on the temperament if not the convictions of a street corner preacher, prepared to see temptation everywhere, ready to overrun a fragile will. My reaction was more than just an attempt to curb an excessive appetite, though, or a response to sensory overload. Beneath the hum, the motion, I was seeing the steady fracturing of the world taking place. I had seen worse poverty in Indonesia and glimpsed the violent mood of inner-city kids in L.A.; I had grown accustomed, everywhere, to suspicion between the races. But whether because of New York’s density or because of its scale, it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well, where, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between [vulgar term for African-Americans starting with n] and [vulgar term for Jews starting with k].

I guess in an Obama Administration, America will finally confront the scourge of hateful bathroom stall graffiti.

It’s repulsive and irritating, but if you’re looking for signs of whether the world is “steadily fracturing,” I don’t know if the first place I would look would be the stall of a public bathroom. You’re not going to find Shakespeare, even in the best of times.