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The Shocking Lack of Historical Knowledge in Today’s America
This is a verbatim transcript of a conversation at work last night:
Colleague: Dennis Rodman is going to meet with ISIS. [This was a rumor going around the internet]
Me: Didn’t he go meet with Kim Jong Un?
Colleague: Yeah.
Me: He’s a regular Jimmy Carter. Someone should throw a rabbit at him.
Colleague: …What!?
It followed — as morning follows malaise — that he hadn’t heard of the Jimmy Carter Rabbit Incident. Neither had anyone else in the conversation.
As I walked the factory the rest of the night, I asked people if they knew President Carter had been attacked by a swamp rabbit. I asked intelligent people; I asked well-informed people; I asked people old enough to hear and remember it at the time. Not a single person to whom I posed the question could remember the incident. Excuses were paltry:
“I never knew rabbits could swim.”
“I wasn’t alive at the time.”
Well, neither was I, but you don’t hear me forgetting one of the funniest events in American History.
I ask you, dear Ricochetti, what is this world coming to?
Image courtesy of the Jimmy Carter Library via Wikipedia.
Published in General
“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
When life gives you lemons, freeze ’em, then chuck ’em at people you don’t like.
When Life gives you lemons don’t make lemonade. Make Life take the lemons back. Get mad. I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?! Demand to see Life’s manager. Make Life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am?! I’m the man who’s going to burn your house down. With the lemons. I’m going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!
Note to self: get Hank a Talking Cave Johnson Portrait for Christmas.
Say what you will about Jimmy Carter, but the American beer industry has much to be thankful for thanks to actions taken during those four years:
http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/jonathan-chait/76819/how-jimmy-carter-saved-beer