I have a minor addiction to reading online American media, if only because it casts life elsewhere into a different context (they say that planet earth is famously beautiful from space). Frankly, this peccadillo would rarely intersect with the agenda of this blog, but I was struck by this article in the New York Times this week. Not so much the article itself - a defence of the creative niche, which could easily be accused of being distilled to the point of triteness - but rather for some of the comments upon it. You don't have to scan very far down to realise that for man, establishing a creative niche is somehow akin to cheating; to invent an umbrella is to cheat your responsibility to get wet like your neighbours. Well, if I follow this idea through, the definition of a fair society would be one where everyone dashes themselves against the rocks equally, and then derives an English sense of inner peace from their neighbour being exactly as unhappy as they are.
