The ill Humored

Living through the last ten years or so, looking around at what’s happened and is still happening politically and economically, no large lessons come to mind, and certainly no solid conclusions. Just one thing pops out. American history makes a lot more sense now. The tone and substance of history textbook writing about the Depression makes a lot more sense after you’ve lived through a similar, inexplicable twist of economic fate. Those textbooks never focused on the causes because… they didn’t KNOW the causes, just like we can’t exactly tell what’s happened to our economy now, and we don’t know what’s coming next. Better to focus on understandable images, breadlines, dustbowls. Textbook descriptions of William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow journalism” getting us into the Spanish-American war around 1900 ring a lot truer today. Those books were trying to say something about corruption and the perversion of journalistic standards, without actually saying the core truth about the opinion-forming power of the media, even newspapers. And so on, and so on, through parallel after parallel. Just a little disgusting that these lessons never penetrate.

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