A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, August 13, 2009

A Teachable Moment

Lawrence O'Donnell's interview with a town hall protester provided one of the most revealing moments in this whole foofaraw. He gets at an essential truth: Most of the protesters and tea-partyers are responding to a generalized angst. Many of them, like the young woman being interviewed, are clueless about what's at stake. All they know are slogans.

Disarmingly, O'Donnell admits that Medicare and Social Security are "socialism." Gasp! We on the left need to remember that ideas we take for granted are completely alien to a large part of the populace. And too long we have left the task of educating people to economic and political reality undone, allowing people to fall into the hands of the Limbaughs and O'Reillys and Glenn Becks.
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