Essay: Little Crimes Against Nature

Folks are dumb where I come from

They ain 't had any learnin'

Still they 're happy as can be

Do-In What Comes Nat-ur-lly

—Irving Berlin, Doin' What Comes Natur'lly

Smart Americans as well as dumb ones have always held a special belief in what comes natur'lly. That belief appears to grow stronger as society pulls further away from nature. As ever more synthetic artifacts of Western civilization emerge from laboratories and test tubes, a great many people have developed an outright crush on nature. Indeed, the supposedly natural is so warmly regarded nowadays that the...

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