11
Followers
23
Following
Reading Slothfully
I was told in elementary school that I only could read at half the speed for success in college. Oh well, one benefit of slow reading is you get to live with the characters a longer period of time. I read in a vain attempt to better understand people. At my other homes, I'm known as a spouse, pop, guy in the choir, physical chemist, computer/web dilettante and child-care provider. In theory, I'm a published author, if you consider stuff like Quenching Cross Sections for Electronic Energy Transfer Reactions Between Metastable Argon Atoms and Noble Gases and Small Molecules to count as publications. I've strewn dozens of such fascinating things to the winds.
Currently reading
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
The Spirit of the Border
Ramona the Brave (Ramona, #3)
The Underground Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Delilah of the Snows
Mrs. Miniver
Betsy-Tacy Treasury (P.S.)
A Christmas Carol
The Way Some People Die
Envy of Angels
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
So Kurt Anderson is trying to tell us how we got to the place we are in America these days, a place where half the population doesn't have problems with a highly corrupt, ignorant, pathological liar running the country. Basically, he says we're pretty much always been this way. The people [European white people] who "settled" the country were prone to believing fantasies. In the southerly parts, the settlers sincerely believed there was gold to be had for the taking. In the northerly parts, people believed all manner of religious fantasies, and insisted their particular fantasies were the only "true" ones. So, they came for religious freedom, but only for their own kind of religion. Religious freedom was not for folks who thought differently. So, anyway, he traces history through P.T. Barnum and the Buffalo Wild West Show, to Disney World, and then to the academics who denied the very existence of truth, it was only differences of opinion. They even claimed that scientific truth was only a construct of the rich and powerful to keep the lower echelons down. Or something. I thought those peculiar idiots had been discredited long ago, but apparently not.
Whatever, it's a rather scary story and doesn't give me much hope for the future. On the other hand, we've been believing fantasies for some 400 years now, so perhaps we'll continue to thrive on our peculiar fantasies for another 400 years.
