Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment (from the NY Public Library following the 9/11 attacks), she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”
The book is The Age of American Unreason
This impassioned, tough-minded work of contemporary history paints a disturbing portrait of a mutant strain of public ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism that has developed over the past four decades and now threatens the future of American democracy. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a culture at odds with America’s heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. With mordant wit, the author offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society—on the political right and the left. America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.
Sounds fun.
[link]
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
Jesus.
::weeps for humanity::
Hey, we're almost out of Natter.
I am not at work today, but I have hours of grading ahead of me.
Edited for cat-induced typos.
I told you all the Fenway bleachers story, right? Where a Korean pitcher, playing for Boston, got heckled (by Boston fans) with:
"Kim! Go back to Pearl Harbor!"
It's like those V-8 commercials where a random passer-by is totally justified in bopping people upside the head.
Hey,we're almost out of Natter
People! Stop bogarting the Natter!
Oh, man, tommyrot, that book sounds so very right up my alley, except that I am already appallingly curmudgeonly for someone of my age and station. I'm concerned that if I actually got my hands on the book, my transformation into a surly old retired Victorian headmistress sitting on a horsehair sofa in her large library, pounding her ivory-topped cane on the floor and grumbling, "Lord have mercy on us all, what
do
they teach them in the schools these days?" would be complete.
I'm so sorry for the ice everywhere and the not-holidays and all, but with a heaping side of sorry for flea and poor sick Dillo painting everything in his immediate environment with snot.
Natter-inos...WAKE UP. Geeesh, less than 50 posts and y'all are asleep. Too many people with the day off? Or are folks actually working?
I'm ready to run screaming from my office. Some people are making work much more complicated than it has to be.
I'm listening to Austin Lounge Lizards and occasionally yelling, "Safety glasses, people!"* How about you?
(*I practice a very laissez-faire brand of teaching.)
