Fighting Words

We'd love to give you some examples. We'd love even more to have our jobs tomorrow. Instead, read this, written about a Democratic senator from Illinois, and picture it with habanero peppers on top: "Dick Durbin is an evil subversive enemy of our country and may he rot in hell."

Or this, commenting on the congressional testimony of a Justice Department official: "The zombie corpses of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams should have burst into the chamber and ripped the head off the government stooge . . . [then] divided and eaten [his] depraved brain before heading over to the increasingly misnamed Department of Justice to dine on [Attorney General] Alberto Gonzales's intestines."

Who are these people typing up the revolution, and what do they tell us about the condition of American civic life?

We decided to meet a couple.

Where do they not differ?

Betsy Newmark and Barbara O'Brien disagree on Social Security, health care, the environment, the role of the courts, bankruptcy laws, Wal-Mart, George W. Bush, philosophical principles of the Enlightenment and the continuing viability of the American Dream. They disagree on the nature of liberty and on the trend line of civilization.

Is life getting better or worse?

They disagree.

They can sit side by side in the plate-banging din of the Palm and seem as if they are on separate planets.

O'Brien: "I believe people are exploited by these powerful interests . . ."

Newmark: "I don't have these same fears of 'powerful interests' . . ."

O'Brien: "Upward mobility in the United States is dead . . ."