Opus 2021-246: On the Street: Is That Spelled with a “K”?

While spending Christmas and New Years in Virginia I went out with my son for the day.  It wasn’t a pre-planned father/son event.  It was a “Get out of the condo while I cook” moment.  We found plenty to do.  One event was visiting a used book store.  It was massive and had a lot of stuff that was not books and a lot of books that were not used.  At one point a boisterous employee asked if I needed any help and since I could not find aisle 2A I was willing to ask.  She couldn’t find it either and substituted taking me to her computer to see if they had what I wanted.  Since I didn’t know what I wanted that presented a problem, but I rose to the occasion.  I have recently read The Communist Manifesto and was feeling my oats to try Das Kapital.  It was a depressing search.

It wasn’t depressing because the computer was so slow or that they didn’t have anything I was looking for.  What was depressing was the ignorance of the employee.  She was a pleasant young woman.  She had a daughter old enough to have a Kindle but with the mask it was hard to figure out much more than that.  What got to me was she had no idea who Karl Marx was.  She had never heard of the Communist Manifesto let alone Das Kapital.  She had never heard of the Gutenberg Project.  

You wonder how the public schools are doing?  Go into a book store and talk to someone who has never heard of possibly the most destructive book in history.  It is a planned result.  An ignorant population is much easier to control than an informed citizenry.

Travel really broadens your understanding of our culture.

homo unius libri