“And all the hilltops soft and glowing

With winter’s brilliant rug of snow—

The world all fresh and white below.”

Alexander Pushkin (James E. Falen, translator) Eugene Onegin

A friend floated the theory that a male always wears a style of underwear different from that of his father. Raised with a boxer-wearing father, the son wears jockeys. If the father wears tighty-whities, the son wears boxer briefs. And so on. There is a lot of merit in this theory. This is another reason that a fatherless family has problems. They boys don’t know what underwear to put on.

She was part of Celtic Woman, which I am only aware of from PBS fundraising programming. Attractive, strapless dress, playing the violin, sort of dancing but certainly moving as she played, with beautiful, flowing red tresses. And I thought, “Does anyone ever say ‘tress’?”

I am of the belief that many Irish songs consist of but a few bars that are incessantly repeated. The song only ends when the musicians need a break.

Several corporations announced one-time $1,000 bonuses for their workers after the tax cut bill. This gave the corporations good publicity and gained them credit with the President. But the tax cut had not yet taken effect, so, apparently these companies had this money just lying around even before the tax cut. So why weren’t the bonuses given before? And the corporate tax cuts, unlike the individual ones, are permanent. Why, then, just a one-time bonus? If that corporate tax cut is going to be so good for workers, why haven’t the wages been raised permanently?

If it is unpatriotic to take a knee during the national anthem to bring attention to police violence against others (a selfless act), isn’t it unpatriotic for the President, promoting his own self-interest, to bash the FBI, a law enforcement agency?

Has the TV been on too long when you find yourself watching pickleball on an obscure sports channel?

At 6PM on Christmas day, the daughter and I were walking home from a movie when a woman stopped and asked us if she was walking in the right direction for the supermarket. We said, “Yes.” I asked her what she was looking for and she replied, “Oatmeal.” Both the daughter and I pointed across the street to a neighborhood store that was open and said, “They must have oatmeal.” “Not the kind I want,” she said. Even though she knew that the supermarket may not have been open, she headed off for it. It seemed like an unlikely search for a Christmas night.

Lose weight. (Oh, as if you haven’t made this self-indulgent, unlikely-to-be-fulfilled resolution in the past.)

Play better golf. (Oh, as if many of you haven’t made this self-indulgent, unlikely-to-be-fulfilled resolution in the past.)

Build a wider readership. (Got any ideas?)

Remember more of what I have read. (Got any ideas on how to do that?)

Pare down my possessions. (Then I can justify buying more stuff.)

Get better gas mileage. (Yes, self-indulgent, but good for the rest of you, too.)

Figure out what gun Jesus will carry if (when) He returns.

Not re-use dental floss too often.

Watch less football even if Aaron Rodgers is playing.

Hook up my backyard intensive burner that I bought to fry chicken. (But I first will have to get over my fear of it.)

Not complain about the slings and arrows of my age. (Fat chance.)

Look for conclusive documentation to establish that Mike Pence does not have joint American-Russian citizenship. (And assume that he does until those records are found.)

Be as nice as pie to the spouse every minute of the every day. (The spouse wrote that.)

I recently purchased a hardcover version of God: A Biography by Jack Miles at Strand. When I got it home, a credit card receipt fell out indicating that someone had bought it shortly after it was published in 1995, paying list price of $27.50 (not an inconsiderable amount for a book two decades ago) at a book shop in Pasadena, California. I wondered how the book had made its way from Pasadena to Manhattan’s Broadway, but, of course, had no clue. I found signs in the book of a careful and interested reader. Numerous penciled underlinings and check marks were on every page, but they stopped mid-chapter on page fifty-eight. Why did the attentive reader stop at this point? I could imagine answers, but I will never really know.

I also bought at Strand Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon. It was a first edition, quite worn, from Great Britain. Inscribed inside was what I took to be the first owner of the book. The handwriting was artistic, but I could not decipher it. Who was that person? On the inside back cover was something perhaps even more intriguing—faint writing. The spouse looked at it and said, “It might say Siegfried Sassoon.” I looked at it again. It was possible. Was I holding a book once signed by Sassoon? If so, the original owner became even more intriguing, but it will all remain an unsolved mystery.

The third book I recently bought at Unnameable brought back memories and presented mysteries. The first page of Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York the Last Two Hundred Years, published in 2000, had a stamp that it was placed in the Manitowoc, Wisconsin, public library on February 15, 2001. Seeing “Manitowoc” brought back memories. You might not be very familiar with this small city, but it was the next town north of where I grew up. I still have memories as a child of visiting a submarine there. You might not know that submarines were built in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, but they were—you can look it up. Manitowoc also held another memory. It was the place where I scored the most points for me in my undistinguished high school basketball career.

The book, however, brought not just memories but also mysteries. I could imagine why the book had been withdrawn from the Manitowoc Public Library—no one was checking it out—but why had it been purchased? Was there a suspected strong interest in the history of New York City’s garbage in this small town on Lake Michigan? And how did this book get from Manitowoc to Brooklyn’s Vanderbilt Avenue?

I do shop at a number of different bookstores, but mostly my bookstore heart now belongs to Greenlight. I thought that it made no sense that two people opened a bookstore in my neighborhood in what had once been an antiques store. I had read those stories about the deaths of independent bookstores, and my neighborhood was an obscure part of Brooklyn where few outsiders would breeze into the store, so opening this new bookstore seemed, to put it charitably, unwise.

I went into it shortly after it opened, and my first reaction was that it was too small. I thought it unlikely that I would find many books I wanted to purchase there, and at its beginning, I did not patronize Greenlight much. However, I had a tradition of reading the New York Times’ best books of the year list, finding selections for Christmas gifts, and heading off to a Barnes & Noble megastore to make the purchases. One year the daughter suggested that I buy locally and get them at Greenlight even if the local place did not offer the same discounts as the chain store, and for several years, I did buy the Christmas books there, but little else.

Over time, however, when I wanted a particular book, I would check out the convenient Greenlight before seeking another bookstore. Greenlight may have looked small, but now I realized that it had a surprising number of books that I sought. I became further impressed by the array of authors it had speaking at the store. And finally, much later than I should have, I found it was a wonderful store for browsing, that crucial factor for a great bookstore. Three or four tables in the center of the store are topped with a carefully arranged set of books, and almost all of them look interesting to me. Now almost every time I go by the store, which can be several times a week, I stop in to browse, and this browsing has led to many purchases. It is a remarkable store, and I am lucky to have Greenlight a five-minute walk from my house. It is in the neighborhood and an impressive store. Who could ask for anything more?

I hope that you, too, can find such a good bookstore.

If I wanted to be a licensed New York Sightseeing guide, I had to pass a test. I knew little about the test except that for a single fee I would get two chances within a year to pass the test. I developed a strategy. I would read as much New York City history as I could, take notes, then review the notes, and take the test. Having taken the test and failed it, I would know what I needed to bone up on, and I should be able to pass the test on the second try.

The Strand was integral to this plan. Each time I was near it, I would go to the bookstore’s extensive New York City section. I would scan the titles for something that looked interesting or about which I knew little and then look at the price. If the book cost less than $10, I would buy it. If it cost more than $10, I would re-shelve it. A glance at a bookshelf behind me as I now write indicates that I bought sixty or so books this way.

A day before I was to go into the hospital to have my right shoulder replaced, I took the test to take my mind off my coming months of pain and inconvenience and self-pity. I answered multiple-choice questions on a computer, and I got my result a few minutes after completing the test. Do you think I would be telling you this if I had not passed? I now have a card with my smiling picture that announces I am a licensed guide, and the Strand gets part of the credit for that.

Having re-established touch with the Strand, I continue to go there regularly. I still buy New York City history books, but I also look for books that will be useful for the spouse when she leads a book group. Other bookstores are also in my life. The Mysterious Bookstore in Manhattan’s Tribeca seems to have every mystery story ever written. Often when a friend convinces me that an author unknown to me has an enjoyable mystery series, I head to Reade Street, and I find it at Mysterious. But I confess there is another reason I love that bookstore. The walls are lined with shelves ten, twelve feet high or maybe even higher. Attached to the bookcases is a railing. And attached to the railing is one of those ladders that slide along the railings. I always wanted one of those, and this is as close as I get to having one. And the ladder is not just for the store employees; I get to climb it. When I am looking for something there, I am disappointed if I the book is not above my standing grasp. I want to climb that ladder.

Whenever I am near Unnameable Books in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, I go in and almost always find on its shelves of used books something to buy. I was there two days ago and bought three books, with each one reminding me of some advantages of used books and their stores. Of course, there is the price. One of my purchases was of a book that I had first seen in the book shop of the New York Public Library, where I was doing research. Although the book had been well reviewed, I was not sure that I wanted to read about the subject matter, as indicated by its title: Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants. But now at Unnameable, I found it at a fraction of the list price and consequently thought I might give it a try.

The stocks of used and new bookstores often overlap, but they will also differ. I will find books in a used bookstore that look like they may interest me that I would not find in a new bookstore. In that last foray in Unnameable, I found a history of science published in America a decade ago about the advance in scientific knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century. I read a few paragraphs and thought it was well written. I have started reading and enjoying it. I doubt that I would have found the Age of Wonder in a new bookstore.

And used books sometimes tantalize me with mysteries and glimpses of stories not contained in the book. A few recent examples to come. (To be continued.)

A white Christmas for me growing up was not simply that snow had blanketed the ground by Christmas, but that it actually snowed on Christmas. By either definition, I don’t remember many white Christmases. It was often bleak and cold on December 25^th in our part of Wisconsin, but at least in my memory the snow, or at least the snow that did not melt away, came later in the season. And since winters did not depart Wisconsin easily, I saw more Easters with snow on the ground than Christmases. In the shadows that the sun never reached behind the garage, there could still be pockets of snow in May.

Even so, however, there was one white Christmas (by my definition) that I have always treasured. While it had to snow on Christmas itself, I had a somewhat expanded notion of “Christmas.” Christmas day was largely for playing with new presents and ended with a boring family get-together at Aunt Hazel’s house. I remember little about it other than that the sister and Cousin Margaret lit into the olives at the first opportunity. Instead, as it is for many Germanic and Germanic-descended people, our main focus for the Christmas celebration was not Christmas Day but on Christmas Eve.

By Christmas Eve, the tree would have been up for a week or so. The buying and mounting of the tree was always a difficult process. Now all the Christmas trees I see for sale seem to be nearly perfect—symmetrical with needle-laden branches everywhere and a straight trunk. Not so back then. Finding an acceptable one without too many flaws was always a difficult and time-consuming task, and when it was brought home, much discussion would ensue about which portion of the tree should face the wall to hide the most defects and whether the tree stood as perpendicular to the floor as the often wavering trunk allowed. Rarely did the family agree on the accepted solution. But the tree was up and decorated well before Christmas Eve.

We opened our presents on Christmas Eve. Nothing was placed under the tree (except for a toy train and a miniature village) before then. I believe that we (I was the youngest of three) were sent to our rooms for a bit. Then there was a “Ho! Ho! Ho!”– now I wonder if that could have been my father—followed by a cry, “Santa’s been here!” One year the family ran to the kitchen window overlooking our backyard. Pointing to a deep, starry sky, one of the parents shouted, “There he goes!” My sister, the eldest of the children, said “I see him.” (Was this the only time she lied to me?) I looked and looked, but I saw no sleigh, no reindeer, no Santa. I had missed him yet again.

Before the presents were opened, however, we went to a Christmas Eve service at the church. This church-going was highly unusual because both parents attended. As far as I can remember, this was the only time of the year my father went, and my mother, at most, went only a few other times a year. (My father drove us kids to Sunday school and then picked us up afterwards. In between he went somewhere else.)

And then one year it happened. We walked into church on crisp winter night. Even though I can’t sing one note on tune, I have always liked Christmas carols, and, unlike on many Sundays, I enjoyed this service. The last carol was “Silent Night,” then my favorite, and it always gave me a peaceful feeling. We left the church, and there it was: A blanket of snow. During the hour of the service, an inch or two had fallen, and the church steps, the sidewalk, the lawns, the road were all white. The snow was continuing, but it was not so much falling as floating. It was the kind of snow that compelled you to catch some on your tongue. The snow almost hung in front the streetlamps causing a light that seemed otherworldly. Every pine tree looked like a Christmas tree. It was a white Christmas the way I had imagined a white Christmas should be. It seemed the correctly beautify and peaceful way to welcome the baby Jesus into the world.

Merry Christmas!

Bookstores were at the core of a cherished day. I had finished law school and was living in New York City where I had been working for a while. The college alumni magazine had published a list of books, in effect a syllabus, for studying the American revolution. Most of the books had been published a decade or more ago. My recent reading had been largely aimless; I had never taken a course on the Revolution; and I thought that it could be interesting to read as many of the books on the list as possible. In those ancient days, you could not simply go online to order the books; you had to physically find them. I had set the next Saturday for my book hunting, but a winter storm hit with seventeen inches of snow stopping at four on Saturday morning. Being then young and full of vim and vigor (what is vim?), I decided to carry out my self-appointed task in spite of the storm. Many streets were yet to be plowed, and many walks were uncleared, but the local subway was running.

I got to Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and started walking east. The sky was a brilliant winter blue. A nippy wind made everyone’s cheeks rosy, but tramping through the drifts and mounds of still-pristine snow kept me warm. Without traffic, it was quiet, and we few pedestrians treated each other reverentially as if we were the deepest friends on a meditative retreat. It was the kind of day where I was thrilled that there was a winter and I was in it.

A few wonderful bookstores still existed on Eighth Street, and I stopped in each of them, but my real destination was Fourth Avenue.  On and around the seven blocks of Fourth Avenue from Astor Place to 14^th Street had been what was called “Book Row,” New York City’s used-book district. The heyday for this book center had been the 1940s and 1950s, and by the time I headed there decades later, many of the stores were gone, but a sizeable number still remained—enough so it took me hours to go through the ones still there.

Most of these stores had a loose organizational layout at best. I might find a handwritten sign on a bookcase that said, “US History” to aid my search. The shelves had no apparent structure, and I would have to scan all the volumes to see if there were any on my list. The stores, it turned out, had a surprising number of them, and every time I found one, I got a bit excited as if I had found something much more than an out-of-print book, but some sort of little treasure that could only be found after an effortful search—the kind of thrill a seeker does not now get on the internet.

After I finished on Fourth having found many but not all the books on the list, I doubled back to Broadway and 12^th Street to Strand Bookstore, what was billed then and now as the City’s largest used book store, and I found a few more sought-for volumes.

That day can no longer be repeated. The Fourth Avenue used book stores are gone; only the Strand, which started on Fourth Avenue, but moved to Broadway in the 1950s, remains. When I came to New York, I was told that Strand Bookstore was the place to buy review copies. Book reviewers and others who got advance copies of books brought their booty to the Strand where they were paid one quarter of the book-jacket price with Strand then listing them for half the jacketed price. A lucky buyer might find a recently-released book that had just been given a great review for half price. I, however, never snagged one of those bargains. I assumed these holy grails disappeared quickly and were found only by those who scoured the store once or twice a day, and I did not.

Because I rarely found a review copy of something I wanted, for me Strand was a giant used bookstore, and since I went to other ones that were more convenient for me, I rarely visited Strand for decades. That changed a few years back for two reasons: An increasing number of my doctors had offices near the Strand. And I decided that I was going to get a license to be a New York City sightseeing guide. (To be continued.)

Barnes & Noble was the most important bookstore in my early New York City days, but I did not restrict myself to it. If I had the time, I would check out the bookstores in whatever part of New York I was in. On the Upper West Side, I would go into a Shakespeare & Co., with its creaky floors and classical music. (I have heard classical music in other bookstores. I don’t remember, however, ever hearing country music in one.) Near Manhattan’s Columbus Circle was the Colosseum, with its multiple levels. On a tony part of Fifth Avenue was Scribner’s, with its balcony and the feeling that a spinster librarian was shushing the present patrons and the ghosts of hosts of distinguished writers. I would frequent Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore and other places on Brooklyn’s Fifth and Seventh Avenues. A marvelous used book store at 15-17 Ann Street, with sloping floors and bookcases that were steadier than they looked, was a great place for spending lunch hour when I worked around the corner on Park Row. I think it was then called the Old Ann Street Bookstore, but it was once named the Isaac Mendoza Bookstore after its original and longtime owner. That store, I have read, started in 1894, closed in 1990, and was at the same location all that time.

When traveling, I try to drop into any local bookstore I see. Forty years ago in New England, it was a barn bursting with used books. It was an amazing sight. I said to the spouse, “We aren’t leaving until we buy something that we otherwise would not get.” I don’t remember what she bought, but I purchased a volume that contained several Mr. Bunting novels, which I had never heard of. The books are about an everyman in WWII London and were delightful. This purchase was so successful that now, whenever I am in a bookstore on a trip, I try to buy a book unknown to me. And thus, in Lisbon or maybe it was the Madrid airport, which had a small English-language section, I bought what is a classic to many but not then to me by Jerome K. Jerome. Three Men in a Boat.

Bookstores are, of course, for buying books, but if you know the title you want, online ordering has advantages, and I have done at least my share of that. A bookstore, however, offers the chance for browsing. You buy a book you were not looking for because you see it and remember it got a good review or your friend Dean enjoyed it. Or you buy it because the jacket copy or the back cover makes it seem interesting or because you pick it up and read a few enjoyable paragraphs or because you are looking for a biography of P.T. Barnum and you find it shelved with other books about nineteenth century characters that appeal to you. In a good bookstore I can easily find the book I seek, but in a good bookstore the displays lead me to books that I did not know I wanted but end up finding provocative, thoughtful, interesting, enjoyable.

Recommendations are another advantage of a good bookstore. New York City bookstores are staffed with reams of bright people with liberal arts degrees who still have dreams of making a living somehow in a literary world. They read and often have to demonstrate that they read to get a job in a bookstore. As a result, they frequently have good recommendations for what you might like to read. Online stores try to mimic this by having on a webpage something like “Others who bought this book also bought. . . .” This does not come close to a conversation with someone who can ask if you have read and liked certain books and then makes recommendations based on that knowledge.

The spouse got a great recommendation decades ago. She told a Barnes & Noble clerk that she was going on vacation and wanted a good summer read. The clerk made inquiries about whether the spouse had liked certain books and authors and then recommended The Age of Innocence andWomen in White. We had not heard of Wilkie Collins before, who was largely forgotten then. But the spouse bought the books, read them, and loved them. She passed the book to me. I read and loved it, and we both went on to read other books by Wharton and Collins.

Bookstores have systematized recommendations by printing out what their sellers thought about some books. These aren’t as valuable as a personal recommendation stemming from a conversation, but I have still used them. Early in the trend, I saw a stack of books in a store above Union Square with a big card saying “First Novels,” and then smaller cards each containing a brief employee write-up of why a certain book was particularly noteworthy. I read an effusive one that was a mystery about racial relations in the Northwest. Based on those comments, I bought the book. Later, Snow Falling on Cedars was a big seller, but it was this recommendation that had me read and be impressed by it well before that.

I did not find it odd or even a sign of our somewhat low socio-economic status that the family did not have books in the house when I grew up. I read a lot of books, but I saw little point in buying them. Books came from the library. Once I read a book, I thought then that I would never re-read it, but if I did, I could check it out again. Buying a book was just a waste of money.

Even so, I did buy at least one book. I was a member of some Junior Astronomy club in those post-Sputnik days and subscribed to “Sky and Telescope” magazine. I understood little of what was covered in the issues. In the reverse of the “Playboy” line, I got it for the pictures, which I found mesmerizing. The magazine gave me the fantasy of building my own telescope, and there was an ad in the back of “Sky and Telescope” for a book on how to do that. The Mead Public Library of Sheboygan, not surprisingly, did not have that book, and I had not heard of interlibrary loans back then. Instead, I decided to buy the book. There wasn’t a real bookstore in town, but a store that mostly sold greeting cards and knick-knacks had a rack or two of paperbacks, and I learned that I could order a book there. After saving allowance and grass-cutting money, I acquired a book on how to grind the lens for a reflecting telescope as well as other important stuff for the telescope-building business. (I never did build it, but my parents bought me a telescope. My chief discovery was how quickly the earth seemed to rotate when I looked at a heavenly object. The image would stay within the viewfinder for only a short time. I learned that I needed counterweights and a clock drive, and all that was beyond me. But, still, I remember how thrilling it was to see the mountains and “seas” of the moon.)

Prange’s, the local department store, had a shelf or two of books, and there I spotted biographies of sports heroes that were not in the public library. This presented a quandary. I did want to read them, and unlike the telescope book, which I thought would be a reference I needed, I did not want to buy them. My solution was to–I don’t want to call it shoplifting—let’s say, whisk a desired book out the store. As soon as I finished it, I would smuggle it back in and carefully place it in the exact spot it had been in before I had “borrowed” it. This was probably the height of reading being a forbidden pleasure for me, and I never got caught doing this.

College changed these patterns. I bought the books for my courses, and now I wanted to retain the books. Having read Tocqueville, Dostoyevsky, or Kant, keeping those books seemed like a symbol of emerging intellectual maturity. I imagined that they kind of person I wanted to be would have a personal library. I didn’t sell the college books back. I still have a few of them.

I mostly remember university bookstores in those days of my formal education although I have a faint memory of Kroch’s and Brentano’s in downtown Chicago where I went to law school. It was not, however, until I began my post-education life in New York City that bookstores really came into my life.

Barnes & Noble was the most important bookstore for me in my early New York days. B & N had but one location then—on 5^th Avenue near 17^th Street—selling both new and used books. I remember it as a warren of rooms and shelves. If I said to a clerk as I entered–in days long before computer inventories–that I was looking for a particular book on Chinese history, the employee might reply, “If we have it, go to our Chinese section. Walk through this room and turn right in the next room and when you get in the next room after that, go past the Roman philosophy racks, and you will see that the bottom two racks of the next bookcase are Chinese history.” And it was amazing what they had. (To be continued.)

When my young friend turned around, I could not help but notice the shiner under his left eye. Some guys tried to rob him as he got out of his car. A scuffle ensued, with my friend adamantly maintaining that he got in some good blows, but clearly, he also took one. The would-be robbers ran off when a shopkeeper came out of his store, and my friend lost nothing. I commiserated with him and told him about various incidents involving me, the spouse, and the daughter. I asked him if his girlfriend had been with him. “No,” he said, but he saw her the next day. He said that she had been very sympathetic. He hesitated for a moment. A slight grin appeared—his first smile of the evening. Then he said, “Sympathetic sex is very good.”

“To me, the movie [It’s a Wonderful Life] meant that if you become unhappy enough, almost anything can pass as happiness.” Akhil Sharma, Family Life.

I was looking in a bookstore window a few blocks from the theater when I heard three men walking past me discussing the Romanian film I had just seen. One said something about Roman, the main character, and continued by asking, “How could he do that to his beautiful girlfriend?” One of the other men maintained, “She was not that beautiful.” And then the trio of men, without any women accompanying them, drifted out of ear shot.

A man stumbled on the corner. His legs would not hold him up. He fell. With much effort, he got up. He weaved about. He fell again. Two women crossing the street came up to him where he lay in the gutter of the crosswalk. They tried to help him stand. He had a slight build, but he was too much for them. Quickly the cook from the nearby Middle Eastern restaurant came out and helped the man to walk a few yards to a stoop where he could sit. A server from the restaurant brought out a glass of water and a cup of coffee. Shortly afterwards, the cook and one of the women helped the man, who had an expensive-looking haircut, into the restaurant. Someone had called emergency services, which arrived in a few minutes. The two emergency services workers loaded him on to a gurney and then into the back of an ambulance, which drove off. One of the restaurant patrons who had gone over to the disabled man said that he had taken ketamine, a horse tranquilizer. During the entire time, the man had a death grip on his telephone held in front of his chest.

Remember “crack babies”? Twenty years ago, the press was filled with stories about children being born to mothers addicted to crack cocaine, often somewhat politely called “crack mothers,” but often labeled “crack whores.” The kids were supposedly permanently damaged and would harm society for generations to come. So, they should be harming us inordinately right now. Why don’t we hear about that? Is it because those scare stories weren’t true? And a quick experiment. Imagine a “crack baby” or a “crack mother.” Did any of you see a white woman or white child?

Someone who had known me for decades said, “When I first met you, I thought you were incredibly arrogant—the kind of person who thought his feces did not stink.” He pronounced “feces” with a hard “c”.

A friend is on a conservative email list. The friend, at my request, now forwards to me these emails, which average four or five a week. Some are cartoons or videos—often quite funny. Some are straight-out opinion pieces. Others, however, are filled with purported facts. I have gotten in the habit of checking the “facts.” It takes little time to do this. Usually a few key words entered into a search engine reveal something about the assertions. More often they reveal something about the particular piece that was sent around because what is distributed is never anything original by the group, but always a forwarded article composed, often years ago, by someone outside the circle, although the original author of the essay is seldom given.

I started this process because often it seemed clear that an asserted “fact” could not be true, or was, at least, unlikely. Some were so obviously fishy that it surprised me that anyone could take the “fact” seriously.

My restraint in keeping the checking to myself was finally broken when a forwarded message purported to reproduce telegrams between General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman on the eve of the signing of Japan’s surrender at the end of WWII. The author of the piece was not given, but he authoritatively stated that the original telegrams were in Truman’s presidential library and not a word had been changed.

MacArthur, according to the account, sent a telegram to the President that contained what would now be considered racist terms describing the Japanese. Truman responded by telling the General that he could not use such terms with the press because the terms were not “politically correct.” MacArthur then expressed bewilderment at what “politically correct” meant, and Truman replied, according to this account, on September 1, 1945, writing, “Political Correctness is a doctrine, recently fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and promoted by a sick mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end!”

Do you wonder if Truman actually wrote that? You don’t have to be a genius to question it, but you do have to be a lot less than that to simply accept it. When did you first hear the term “politically correct”? When did you first hear the term “mainstream media”? I punched a few words from the supposed telegraphic exchange into Google, and I found that the inauthenticity of the telegrams had been exposed many times in the last few years. The words had not been written. The telegrams  were not in any Truman archives.

I wrote to my friend who had forwarded me the message: “This is lame. If it is meant to be satire, it fails for lack of humor. If it is supposed to delude people into thinking it is true, anyone with a modicum of historical sensibility or of critical sensibility would never give this unquestioning acceptance. It is sad if this needs debunking, but apparently it does, and it has been debunked many times. For example: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/trumanpc.asp.”

I also, however, sent it to recipients of the email that “reproduced” the MacArthur-Truman exchange. I got no response from anyone on that extensive list. Instead, the next email to this group started with an admonition that the emails should not be forwarded to unsympathetic people, and the addresses of the recipients were now blocked. Surprise, surprise! These people did not want to know if what they passed around had been debunked. They were indifferent to the truth. Or in Franfortian terms, they were content to eat bullshit.

This group is not alone in that desire. Many in our society are happy to receive bullshit. Even though it is often easy now to do some checking for accuracy, they don’t do it. They are, too often, indifferent to the truth. If many are willing to consume bullshit, it is not surprising that others are willing to provide it.

Of course, we get bullshit on many different topics—often about personalities in popular culture, for example—and there is bullshit throughout the political spectrum, but I don’t think it is bullshit to believe that never before have we had a President who has provided so much, so regularly. And perhaps we have never before had so many people not just willing to accept it, but seemingly to desire it.

This should lead us to think about what this pervasive political bullshit culture will do to our country as the steaming bullshit mounds will reach increasingly unprecedented heights in the coming years. For example, Frankfort maintains that cultural conditions and epistemological beliefs can help spread bullshit. It proliferates where it is denied that “we can have reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things really are.” But isn’t it also likely that the proliferation of bullshit and its acceptance will also lead to more people believing that there is no reliable access to an objective reality and no way of knowing how things truly are? And if that happens, haven’t we entered a bullshit spiral from which we might never escape?

And perhaps after discussing Frankfort’s On Bullshit, the time is nigh to discuss Aaron James’s book, Assholes: A Theory.