My disenchantment with Harvard, though, like most disenchantments, got worse over time. In the beginning, it seemed like the most exciting place in the world, the ideal place in which to get educated and build a world-class mail-order business.

And so, from the moment I moved into my Harvard dorm, my double life began. By day, I led the life of an eager young intellectual, working my way into the best classes, talking with the professors after class, joining the pistol team, even starting an alternative student newspaper with a group of like-minded libertarian students who came together for a course on the philosophy of free market economics. (Many of these guys now run Washington.)

By night, though, I was “Mr. Mail Order,” coming up with more and more ideas to sell cheap merchandise in low-class publications. While in the late afternoon, after classes, my fellow students went to their mailboxes to pick up their copies of Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and an occasional letter from home, I would show up daily at the mail room and bring back armfuls of the trashy publications to which I subscribed in order to stay abreast of the latest mail-order fads. Most of my fellow students had never even heard of magazines like the National Enquirer, Midnight, Globe, Photoplay, True Confessions, and the dozens of others that were piled all over my room, and which I spent my nights reading. Undoubtedly, students working in the mail room must have assumed I was taking a comparative sociology course on the effect of the media on middle-class consumption patterns. (And, in a way, they would have been right.)

Nights when other housemates were attending cheese and sherry seminars or going to the common rooms to hear classical music performances by student prodigies like Yo-Yo Ma, I was in the TV room spending the whole night watching All in the Family, Maude, and The Tonight Show so I’d be in touch with what “middle-class America” was thinking.

Not that I enjoyed the magazines or the TV shows, but watching them was my “job.” In fact, I have come to hate television and blame it for many of the ills in our society. As a parent of eight children, I have found that TV is the worst thing in our house. When it’s on, the kids just sit there, watching it like zombies. They don’t interact, except to fight over the channel. They don’t read, they don’t play, they don’t talk to each other. Do their homework? You’ve got to be kidding! They don’t do anything. They sneak downstairs, stay up late watching, and wind up depressed and unable to function.