More excerpts ..

...from The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby.

The real importance of the sixties in American intellectual history is that they marked the beginning of the eclipse of the print culture by the culture of video: the political street theater of the late sixties was perfectly suited to video, and vice versa. It will never be possible to tell the tail from the dog, because video works well for nearly every actor on the political stage -- whether a student celebrity shouting through a megaphone on the steps of a university library or a president bragging "Mission Accomplished" on the deck ofan aircraft carrier. The only kind of politics that does not lend itself to video images is any political appeal to thoughtfulness, reason, and logic. The fusion of video, the culture of celebrity, and the marketing of youth is the real anti-intellectual legacy of the sixties. If only this trifecta had been narrowly political, it could never have gained the power it exercises in every area of American culture today. 

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An integral element ofKennedy's election strategy was his portrayal of religion as a private rather than a public affair. "I do not speak for my church on public matters -- and the church does not speak for me" was the famous reassurance uttered by the candidate at a press conference before Protestant ministers in Houston. 

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That is not to say that my parents' friends and neighbors were irreligious or anti-religious but that they were perfectly comfortable with the idea that Caesar and God had separate domains. Like so manv American academics and liberal clergy of that era, they would have seen fundamentalist biblical literalism as a primitive form of faith that belonged to a less educated past, in which religion had yet to come to the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists like my great uncle made the entirely reasonable assumption that the expansion of knowledge about every aspect of the natural world would produce a less credulous American public. They assumed that the growing availabilky of scientific, historical, and anthropological evidence would deter the spread of both religious and nonreligious beliefs that not only lacked a basis in reality but frequently contradicted reality. That assumption, reasonable as it seemed at the time, was wrong. 

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The most recent assessment by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based agency that conducts regular education evaluations in the world's most industrialized nations, found that American fifteen-year-olds ranked twenty-fourth out of twenty-nine countries in mathematical literacy. Only Portugal, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Mexico ranked behind the United States in the 2005 assessment. 

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The night before, I had met an honor student at an awards dinner and happened to mention Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats as a major innovation in political communication in the twentieth century. She looked absolutely blank, and I realized that even if she knew who FDR was, she had never heard about the fireside chats -- which meant that she had reached her senior year in college without learning much about the New Deal or Roosevelt's place in American history.

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In 2007 alone, the Los Angeles Times folded its separate Sunday book review into an opinion section, cutting the number of book pages from twelve to ten, while the San Francisco Chronicle dropped its weekly book pages from six to four. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution eliminated the job of book editor altogether.

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As John Updike eloquently argues, "The printed, bound and paid-for book was -- still is, for the moment -- more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other's but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village."