    12

    Righteous Indignation=Greed for Real Estate

      Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures

    than from the convulsions of the elements.

                                     Edward Gibbon

    There is no nation, it seems, which has not been promised the whole

    earth....

                                     Elias Canetti

    An amoeba making its way through a pond filled with fellow

    creatures has a habit those other beastlets may find irritating.  The

    amoeba is a sluggish, microscopic blob that wobbles slowly through

    the fluid it calls home, looking for something to eat.  When it

    encounters some other enthusiastically wriggling micro-creature, it

    gradually enfolds the neighbor in a watery embrace.  To do it, the

    rubbery amoeba doubles up around the hapless creature, pinches itself

    together, and literally surrounds the drop of water that contains its

    guest.  Then it sucks the drop and its inhabitant deep inside its own

    body.  The ingested droplet now appears to a microscopist as a

    temporary bubble (technically known as a vacuole) moving within the

    amoeba's transparent form.

    The amoeba floods the bubble-like dungeon in which it has

    trapped its captive with digestive fluids.  Slowly those liquids pick

    apart the proteins, amino acids, oxygen and hydrogen which make up

    the body of the squirming prisoner.  The host absorbs the resulting

    soup.  Then his metabolism busily reassembles the components of his

    erstwhile boarder, this time fashioning them into sections of amoeba.

    One entelechy has disappeared.  Another has been replenished.

    William Buckley, the archconservative, and Arthur Schlesinger, a

    highly credentialed liberal, were arguing one day on Buckley's TV

    show about America's budget deficits.  They disagreed about nearly

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