Galacto-Intolerance.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: The discovery of a new galaxy had barely been announced, when a newspaper article appeared declaring our galaxy was the better one; there is recession in much of the world, but our stock market rolls on to higher and and higher levels; these and other peeves are discussed - Brief Article

Lately, I've been feeling the way The New York Times looks on those days when the boys down in the print room don't get the colors aligned exactly right. Fuzzy, out of whack, no crisp edges. Like I need some 3-D wraparounds to get things back in focus. The locus of my problem is us, i.e., the U.S.

I think I'm embarrassed.

It really hit me after one Tuesday Science Times article chronicled the discovery of a new galaxy, similar to ours, suncentric with lazy circling planets. At first, they thought it was just a star, but in space objects are closer than they appear, and it turned out to be a full-blown, self-contained cosmos. The article was coolly low-key for such terrific news. Not that I had been obsessively making mashed potato dioramas of it or anything, but I was quite cheered by the discovery of the presence of a sister solar system--at last, something other than us.

Two days later, there was an editorial column concerning the galactic discovery. It couldn't even wait until the next Science Tuesday rolled around. The writer sniffed that despite the existence of another, ours is the best galaxy. He said we have a bigger sun, plus more and cooler planets. We're 60 percent galactier! I was stunned. I thought maybe it was section creep and that some of the insufferable dot smugness of Thursday's "Circuit" section had seeped into the editorial page.

I swung my metal detectors back and forth several times over the editorial, looking, hoping, for traces of irony. No beeps went off in my earphones. No arrows moved on my dials. The writer had meant it. Here was another symptom of our boundless imperialism, another manifest of our destiny--this time, galacto-intolerance.

The intolerance is not always on such a large scale. Sometimes there are shocking micro-manifestations. As I was entering Riverside Park in New York City one afternoon, I saw a thirty-something man notice the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt at the entranceway. He stopped, looked more closely, and then read the plaque at her feet: "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home. Such are...