the culture of distraction
Fortunately I would have had no idea who this silly girl was, if it weren't for the good old New York Times.
Anyway, a woman called Susan Jacoby has written a book called The Age of Unreason, and here is what made her decide to write it. It was September 11, 2001...
"Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, 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."
Actually: note how the NYT has to carefully embed the real answer into its article - just in case its readers might not be able to admit to themselves that they don't know what the hell Pearl Harbor was...
6 comments:
Can anyone really be that ignorant? I fear the answer is "yes."
Nick, you KNOW it's true! It was on TV!
Noooo. Noooo. I will go and stick my head in a paper bag right now and recite "George Bush hasn't got the highest IQ in the US" 100 times.
Mopsa, you do mean "lowest," don't you.
What interests me is the notion that somehow the pursuit of happiness is killing the creative impulse. Does that mean that people must be miserable to make good art, good points, meaningful literature? This is not rhetorical, I really can't figure it out. I'd like to think you don't have to suffer to make good art. Michele
Sadly Ms Baroque, no....on the basis of that clip I wonder if perhaps his "voters" thought he was head and shoulders above them intellectually.... I know, I know, dreadful stereotyping of the whole nation, but that airhead was just so very depressing with all that Europe is a country and they speak French, I think. Arghh!
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