2020 US election - The fat lady is warming up in the wings

[Bob Schroeck]

That's one reason right there that I'm sure there's a master troll behind QAnon -- it plays so perfectly to the ignorance of the average low- to lower-middle class American citizen. (Not their fault, but forced on them by the changes in education over the past eighty years. When I was a kid, I amassed, more or less by accident, a small collection of elementary school textbooks* dating from around 1910 to maybe 1950 -- no, I don't know where they are now, and I wish I did, because the older ones are surely worth something to collectors today. Anyway, while some/most of the contents aged rather less than gracefully, other differences between those books and what I was learning from was amazing, particularly the level of discourse on how American democracy functioned. I truly believe there was a reason that civics stopped being taught in American schools about the time I was in elementary school, and that reason was for the benefit of the elected rather the electorate.)

* As a side effect of amassing a large collection of books of every kind, many of which are still in our multi-thousand-volume library.