re: #255 Dr Lizardo

With the evolution/creationist debate of yesterday, and the utterances of so many on the right, I cannot help but think the a substantial element of the RW’ers are retreating into their own reality.

It reminds of the opening quote from E.L. Doctrow’s “Ragtime”:

Mind you, that’s pulled from my memory; it’s been 20 years since I’ve read that book, and I can’t remember the rest of the quote, but it stuck out in my mind over the decades.

That’s the reality so many on the right are trying to retreat to; a reality where every day is the Fourth of July, and there no troublesome “others” to disturb them. A reality where God is in His heaven, the band is playing Sousa, and the streets are clean, the houses prim, the white picket fences in good order.

Just like the 20th Century never happened.

Your memory’s not too bad, just elliptical.

In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay windows and a screened porch. Striped awnings shaded the windows. The family took possession of this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it seemed for some years thereafter that all their days would be warm and fair. The best part of Father’s income was derived from the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism, including fireworks. Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900’s. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another. That was the style, that was the way people lived. Women were stouter then. They visit the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants.