Everyone-and we mean everyone-in the Brotherhood gets an equal vote on how we carry out our dual mission: tirelessly advocating for our mutant brethren on one hand, and introducing the feeble human armies to our stockpile of gassed-up Ford Pintos on the other.
Not long after Mr. Bush announced the appointment of Mr. Kissinger on Wednesday, Democratic Congressional leaders picked one of their brethren, former Senator George Mitchell, to serve as vice chairman.
"You name a walk of life and one of our brethren is at the vanguard.
(We do catch him performing a secret handshake with one of his brethren).
Ginsburg has said that Scalia is the only one of her brethren who can reliably make her laugh and the only one who can carry a tune.
Here, too, was the New York City Correction Department Emerald Society, disinviting the correction commissioner from marching beside its members because he had demoted one of their brethren.
Each quarterback who takes a snap in today's N.F.L. games does so with the backdrop of one of his brethren, Jeff George, having been cut, not benched, last week by the Washington Redskins after two measly games.
The seagull community, however, got painful flashbacks to Dave Winfield killing one of its brethren with a throw in a 1983 game in Toronto, an occasion that Yankees Manager Billy Martin marked with the quip, "It's the first time he's hit the cut-off man all season".
There are plenty of perfectly understandable reasons for these ignoble traditions, not least the fact that such things are self-perpetuating, tribalism being in part a search for what we might describe – with absurd daintiness, in the circumstances – as one's spiritual brethren.
Sometimes, however, we get so bogged down by our own needs and responsibilities that we forget that to be part of God's nation means to share His devotion, compassion and love with every one of our brethren, particularly those who need it most.
