ratuses.
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The injection of fantasy into the real offends the aesthetic sense, but the true price is paid in blood -- in the torture of prisoners, in the launch of wars.  If a grasp of reality and the constitutional machinery to act upon it remain intact, then every other ill can be addressed. But if these are lost, the capacity to recover is lost with it, and the game is over.
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<p>
<i>Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is most recently the author of <a