#236905 - 08/10/2004 02:06
Name Recognition
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 06/10/1999
Posts: 2591
Loc: Seattle, WA, U.S.A.
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I had occasion to work on a rally last Saturday with a very nice, bright (and very pretty, but *married* unfortunatedly!) woman who I will guess is about 35-40. Mother of three. Owner with her spouse of a small, specialized manufacturing business. Not lacking in the smarts department.
She saw my "Bush/Orwell '04" bumper sticker and said "Ummmm. War of the Worlds, right?"
I had another conversation with an acquaintance -- a very smart guy in a lot of respects -- who made note of the book that I was reading -- Seymour Hersh's latest "Chain of Command: The road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" -- and asked about it. I said "Yeah, Seymour Hersh, the muckraker who pretty much made his name over My Lai".
This gent, graduated from high school in 1981, asked "What's My Lai?".
_________________________
Jim
'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.
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#236906 - 08/10/2004 02:20
Re: Name Recognition
[Re: jimhogan]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/01/2002
Posts: 3937
Loc: Providence, RI
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Quote:
I had occasion to work on a rally last Saturday with a very nice, bright (and very pretty, but *married* unfortunatedly!) woman who I will guess is about 35-40. Mother of three. Owner with her spouse of a small, specialized manufacturing business. Not lacking in the smarts department.
She saw my "Bush/Orwell '04" bumper sticker and said "Ummmm. War of the Worlds, right?"
I had another conversation with an acquaintance -- a very smart guy in a lot of respects -- who made note of the book that I was reading -- Seymour Hersh's latest "Chain of Command: The road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" -- and asked about it. I said "Yeah, Seymour Hersh, the muckraker who pretty much made his name over My Lai".
This gent, graduated from high school in 1981, asked "What's My Lai?".
I wonder if they know what Chappaquiddick is.
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#236908 - 08/10/2004 11:42
Re: Name Recognition
[Re: jimhogan]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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People are much stupider than you think they are, Jim. I have to give your lady friend credit for at least getting the fact that it was a literary reference, and possibly a negative one.
These are the reasons that I refuse to get clever things when I intend to make a statement. People are too ignorant.
I'll have to admit that I'm not too knowledgeable about Viet Nam, but the US officially left there right around the time I was born, so I don't remember anything about it personally. And, for some reason, it seems harder to learn about recent things than those well in the past. The spin hasn't been finalized, I suppose.
Edited by wfaulk (08/10/2004 11:46)
_________________________
Bitt Faulk
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#236909 - 10/10/2004 04:30
Re: Name Recognition
[Re: jimhogan]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/07/1999
Posts: 5549
Loc: Ajijic, Mexico
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This gent, graduated from high school in 1981, asked "What's My Lai?".
Or Gulf of Tonkin...
They didn't even have to make up stories about weapons of mass destruction there, but the results were pretty much the same.
We'll never learn, will we?
tanstaafl.
_________________________
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"
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#236910 - 10/10/2004 07:15
Re: Name Recognition
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12338
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Quote:
I'll have to admit that I'm not too knowledgeable about Viet Nam, but the US officially left there right around the time I was born, so I don't remember anything about it personally. And, for some reason, it seems harder to learn about recent things than those well in the past.
My high school seemed far more interested in the reconstruction period than the Vietnam War. I seem to recall studying it for nearly a full week in the whole four years.
_________________________
Matt
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#236911 - 10/10/2004 15:56
Re: Name Recognition
[Re: Dignan]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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That's true, but at the same time, I don't want to imply that the last learning I got was in school. Even finding stuff out on your own seems more difficult with more recent events.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk
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#236912 - 10/10/2004 16:34
Re: Name Recognition
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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Quote:
Even finding stuff out on your own seems more difficult with more recent events.
I've noticed this too, and I reckon it's because news media tend to be run by people in their fifties or older, who were there and so don't feel the need to explain those events to people. In the UK there's a rule that, with certain national-security exceptions, all cabinet papers get released thirty years later. Every January 1st the newspapers are full of salacious and potentially fascinating stories about, say, the Suez crisis, with an utter lack of enough context to make them comprehensible to people of our age.
BBC TV once had a brilliant series called "The Rock 'N' Roll Years", which went through the Sixties and Seventies, a year in each half-hour programme, playing that year's hit singles over a mixture of concert footage and (silent) news footage from the year, with a news ticker along the bottom. The analysis was brief but insightful, and probably still makes up about 80% of what I know about Sixties and Seventies current affairs.
The BBC web site's On This Day is very good at contextualising.
Edit: and for the record, I've heard of HG Wells and the Gulf of Tonkin, but not the names My Lai or Chappaquiddick (though on looking them up, I'd heard of the Chappaquiddick incident but not registered the name). And any American who thinks that Europe has all the good place-names can clearly never have been to Chappaquiddick (or for that matter Passamaquoddy Bay).
Peter
Edited by peter (10/10/2004 16:46)
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#236914 - 13/10/2004 19:58
Re: Name Recognition
[Re: tanstaafl.]
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old hand
Registered: 15/02/2002
Posts: 1049
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Hey, have you guys seen the movie "Fog of War"? Great movie... Errol Morris did another great documentary called "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" that I think most on this BBS would like, too, but that is off-topic.
Jim
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