mindstalk | (Reply)

Let's see - Z (land nav god of the universe) deals all the time with Marines who think that a compass works because there is a big block of iron under Hudson's bay. It's rampant and always makes me laugh.

A girl in my China study program who toured Tianamen square with our group and was completely ignorant of the events that had happened there. Maybe not that unexpected for a random American but she was of Chinese decent, with relatives in Taiwan, and majoring in Asian studies. Same girl later at the Forbidden City - "Wasn't Buddha born here?"

I think I did a LJ post about Jacoby's book _The Age of American Unreason_ (haven't read it yet). Apparently she decided to write it after the following 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.”