Oh it does go on. That is just the beginning.

Packer's response? That they're not actually friends, nor were they ever coworkers, and haven't in fact met that frequently. (Six times, he says!) And:

Some of Danner's work has my complete admiration-"a European niche in American letters" is only a term of abuse if you want it to be. My criticisms of his essays were based on literary, moral and intellectual, not political, grounds.

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"It's like they're afraid of me! So they hire a guy who's more comfortable dealing with a masculine-type person. I stand there and talk to the customer, and the customer doesn't talk to me or look at me, he talks to the intermediary, and the intermediary talks to me. It's the yuppie buffer." He wasn't slurring gay men-he described these customers as mainly "metrosexuals"-nor was the problem all yuppies, some of whom had been his customers for years. It was a new group who had moved from Manhattan in the past few years, and who could not detach themselves from their communications devices long enough to look someone in the eye or notice the source of a leak. This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer's world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions-had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger's symptoms. It was a ruling class that, out of sheer over-civilization, was quickly losing the ability to hold onto its power.

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