Health. Paul Keating Insults Archive. The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition. - By Deborah Blum. Archives de l' Ontario / Wikimedia Commons It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital.
He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat. Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. Eco - "Eternal Fascism: 14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" By Umberto Eco Writing in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12-15.
Excerpted in Utne Reader, November-December 1995, pp. 57-59. The following version follows the text and formatting of the Utne Reader article, and in addition, makes the first sentence of each numbered point a statement in bold type. Italics are in the original. For the full article, consult the New York Review of Books, purchase the full article online; or purchase Eco's new collection of essays: Five Moral Pieces.