Opening paragraphs........

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.  The discounted sociologist Jared Schmitz, who was packed off from Harvard to a minor religious college in Missouri before earning tenure when a portion of his doctoral dissertation was proven fraudulent, stated that in a culture in the seventh stage of rabid consumerism the peripheral always subsumes the core, and the core disappears to the point that very few of the citizens can recall its precise nature.  Schmitz had stupidly confided to his lover, a graduate student, that he had in fact invented certain French and German data, and when he abandoned her for a Boston toe dancer this graduate student ratted on him,  This is neither specifically here nor there to our story other than to present an amusing anecdote on the true nature of academic life.  Also, of course, the poignant message of a culture spending its time as it spends its money; springing well beyond the elements of food, clothes, and shelter into the suffocating welter of the unnecessary that has become necessary.
-Jim Harrison,  The Beast God Forgot to Invent