Thursday, February 14, 2008

if it wasn't so sad, it'd be funny

an author walks home on 9/11:

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.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”


Hand-wringing About American Culture - Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? - New York Times

we're not only hostile to knowledge, if we saw it, we'd light some torches, chase it though the streets and then tar and feather it. then we'd go home and drink a beer.

2 comments:

Dawntreader said...

In a not dissimilar vein you might enjoy this. Here in the UK the Archbishop of Canterbury recently got into a lot of hot water with some remarks about Shari'ah law.

It was put to one caller to a radio phone-in that the churches were in decline: he said "and no wonder, with idiots like him in charge. Jesus Christ would be spinning in his grave!"

You couldn't make it up.

Delia Christina said...

that caller is hereby sentenced to 8 hours of basic bible study!