"Morality Masquerading as Fact" said Kinsey ...We Need Him Again
Just back from "Kinsey," a superb, must-see movie for our neo-puritan times. We took our teenaged kids and our college-age niece for a post-Thanksgiving dinner outing. And they were full of questions, exclamations and thanks after the movie; stunned at the level of ignorance pre-Kinsey about what they consider common sexual information now.
Then I told them how health textbooks in Texas schools no longer include any information on contraception. The politics of morality trumps science and health and common sense.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."