The Age of Unreason
Feb 17th, 2008 at 8:40 am by Susie
Susan Jacoby has written a book about American hostillity to knowledge:
Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, 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.”
Come on…doesn’t everybody know it wasn’t over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Neidermeyer? DEAD!
IMO, the first sentence tells you everything you ned to know about our culture-and what the writer thinks of its subject.
“Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match”
Imagine that sort of thing in a piece on John McCain:
“Short, portly, balding, Mr. McCain mumbles in a soft monotone, conspicuously turning away from the camera to hide the bulge on the left side of his jaw left by cancer surgery.”
Think that would ever get by the editor’s blue pencil?
Empty suits. Fits the current administration well.
I am going to go buy the book and read it. How about you?
One of my friends made a comment on 9/11 about how he thought it was like Pearl Harbor. My immediate response was that it was more like the Riechstag burning down. Of course, it could have been worse. Several ladies in our office who had gathered to watch news coverage on our tv kept say things like “and there shall be wars and rumors of wars,” causing me to bite my tongue so hard it hurt.
Moyers interviewed her for his “Journal” Friday night; the transcript might be available at the PBS site (I’m too short on coffee to look for the link myself).
[...] on education and literacy in the US that is surprisingly good. The first article is by author Susan Jacoby, and the second article is a response penned by Harvard educational psychologist Howard Gardner. It [...]
GREAT BOOK ! I am buying for friends as a gift to read.
The only thing that worries is….. are we going to go out and blame our teachers on our dumbing down, instead of ourselves?
Buy It!