Ben Vore > Recent Status Updates

“Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning.”

Umbridge is one of the most vile characters ever to appear on the page, a magical Nurse Ratched. I hated her the first time I read this, and that hasn't changed. What has changed is how many real world characters -- particularly those running our government and education -- have got that Umbridge in them nowadays. (For example, the Ohio legislators who wrote and signed H.B. 190.)

“He rewrote the past to control the future, because that is what authoritarians do.”

Remarkable that when Carter said what was both true and obvious — that Reagan’s Neshoba County Fair speech and his invocation of “states’ rights” was a message of “hatred,” adding that “racism has no place in this country” — the media turned it into a referendum on whether Jimmy Carter (Jimmy Carter!) was being “mean.”

Hard to believe, given where the party of Reagan is in 2025, that the Gipper responded to a 1980 audience question about illegal immigrants by answering, “Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, and make it possible for them to come here legally,” adding that he wanted to “open the border both ways.”

This book affirms what Adam Serwer wrote about the Trump/Musk feud: “The one bridge that connects Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump is slashing public services while showering tax cuts on the rich. This is the Republican Party’s most sacred, fundamental value, the one it almost never betrays. Whatever else Trump and Musk may fight about, they are faithful to that.”

“You weren’t last in line when God gave out fists.”

“Who better to recruit than a librarian when you’re dealing with a fledgling dictatorship?”

The previous King I read (Hearts in Atlantis) made frequent allusions to The Lord of the Flies, but this book is his real homage to Golding and one of his fullest meditations on societal breakdown. As Big Jim Rennie puts it, “Once the beast is out of its cage, it could bite anyone, anywhere.”

Perlstein is always good at bringing in pop culture (usually film) to illuminate politics — and vice versa. I never realized just how much Superman is a fantasy of conservative nostalgia.

Pearlstein's love of the word "peroration" continues (two times so far this book). I get it. Great word.

“It was the epitome of Regan’s rhetorical gifts, that capacity to cleanse any hint of doubt regarding American innocence. That was the soul of his political appeal: his liturgy of absolution.”

Of course Ronald Reagan didn’t like Roots.

“Like the Amish raise their barns, Mainers search for each other in the woods. It’s what we do.”