Subject to Debate.

The article discusses the paper "Bowling Alone," by Robert D. Putnam. He quotes approvingly a passage from an oral history of the war: "you just felt that the stranger sitting next to you in a restaurant, or someplace, felt the same way you did about the basic issues?" Like the importance of keeping black people out of that very restaurant, perhaps, and of putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps. As for war bonds, one has to be a true masochist to buy war bonds today, given that U.S. President George W. Bush has just engineered, under the guise of economic stimulus, another gigantic tax cut for wealthy corporations and the rich, and an airline-bailout package that underwrites the multimillion-dollar salaries of industry executives while offering nothing to the nearly 100,000 who've lost their airline jobs.