dross

As I’ve written before, the concentration of wealth in America has reached levels that make the gilt of the 19th century Gilded Age look like dross.

West Indies moved ahead, Root was asked to bowl some off-spin dross into the pads of Da Silva, who swept three fours and hit a six over long-on.

But what is remarkable about the Biden era is the degree to which critics on the left, right, and center basically agreed with one another beneath all the ideological dross.

Hinton R. Helper, a visitor from North Carolina who would eventually gain notoriety as a white supremacist, reported in 1855 on the city’s “rottenness and its corruption, its squalor and its misery, its crime and its shame, its gold and its dross.... Degradation, profligacy and vice confront us at every step.”

But to appreciate the treasure it becomes, you have to understand the dross from which it came.