Back to the Future

Harper's apologizes for Lewis Lapham's time warp trip. Sort of. He calls it a "rhetorical invention," and says "the author mix[ed] up his tenses" then lapsed "into poetic license." Whew; three different shades of excuse-making in one paragraph. Fact is, he tried to pull a fast one on his readers, passing off prejudice as judgment, and tripped over his own calendar.