Editor:
Consonant with your cover feature “Missing Stories” is a missing observation.
It is a highly prescient one written in July of 1920 by the prominent newspaper reporter and columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun, H.L. Mencken:
“As democracy is perfected, the office [of the presidency] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Mencken’s prophecy is now fact, owing to metastasizing ignorance and vaunted pride in it. Thanks to corrupt and shallow institutions of (allegedly) higher education, the American people know no more about what goes on in Washington than they do what happens in Imphal, Tallinn, or Mogadishu.
Your cover presumes citizens would read missing stories were they published.
Fewer and fewer of them read anything at all, distracted as they are with the open cesspool known euphemistically, and misleadingly, as the social media. Their noses are in their cell phones and iPads, even in crosswalks.
When was the last time you saw someone reading a serious — serious —book in public?
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” — Jefferson, Monticello, January of 1816.
Paul Mann, McKinleyville
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This article appears in Reggae Falling.
FYI, many of history’s worst tyrants were “well-read” and “well-traveled”. Utter meaningless measurements of intelligence. Except for U.C. Berkeley in the 1960’s, America’s universities are sanctuaries for the privileged classes.
The current U.S. President is a natural outcome following 40 years of democratic support for “bipartisan” policies divesting from U.S. human resources, services, housing, education, infrastructure, including privatization, job exports, wars for oil, tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of financial markets and their subsequent bailouts, again and again…
Homeless Americans are now filling our streets and like the 1930’s, a courageous leader will eventually respond as American’s suffering, protests and demands gradually become ubiquitous.
Catalysts for successful social change are unpredictable, usually a very slow, painful process.