JAMES LILEKS: “What do you do when everyone else is finding horrors in the past — slithery alabaster horrors sliding their tentacles through the loam of the human record, injecting poison into every stratum — and your discipline doesn’t seem to be loaded with evil? You’re eager to help! You want to be an ally! So you reexamine the past, interrogate it. That’s a commonly used word, and it’s amusing, as it makes you think of some hard-boiled precinct captain propping up a dead body in a chair under a single light and grilling him. Confess! You were there, we know it! The more you deny you had anything to do with it, the more we know you’re guilty! So what has to be tossed on the pyre this week? Furniture.”

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