"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
First Jordan Marsh was swallowed by Macy's, now Filene's -- the two anchor department stores of downtown Boston following John Hancock and Gillette and the Globe and a domino succession of local banks in being swallowed up by vast out-of-town conglomerates.
Filene's Basement, a separate entity since being spun off some years ago, will remain, but it is unclear what will happen to the original branch with its own subway entrance still operated in the basement of the downtown Filene's.
Some might see efficiencies resulting from everything ultimately being run by a few mega-corporations. Some clearly are making a lot of money out of mergers. Perhaps this is the free market at work, tending naturally toward consolidation.
But it says here it isn't a good thing. Should local institutions that gave towns and cities their distinctive heart and color be lost to a coast-to-coast homogenization of the One Great Company?
It seems to me that a Democratic Party that imbibed a bit of Chestertonianism while reclaiming its Jeffersonian agrarian roots to celebrate the small and the local would find a wide audience.