What to read, and why

How to outsmart FOX

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, May 15, 2025 – Literature presupposes eternal eloquence the way screened content knows its own impermanence. Whereas immortality awaits solitary poets and story tellers, it takes companies of people to transform scripts and screenplays into temporary sensations, plus additional companies to distribute, preserve, and re-purpose content.

Literature is cumulative the way screened content is serial. One deploys the eternal standards of eloquence that would land a writer in the pantheon, while the other aims to so reward investors that they will green-light a sequel, if not fund a whole franchise of content.

If it is hard and expensive to sell one original program, it is easy and cheap to sell a derivative one. So it is with books, but muse-driven writers keep writing, no matter how meagre the pay.

As minds are broadened and deepened by literature, screened content hobbles them because it makes viewers believe actors are who they appear to be, not who they are in reality.

As consciousness is made broad and deep by the reading of literature, the reception of screened content requires clean sweeps of the receptive membrane, which keeps consciousness in a perpetual condition of tabula rasa.

Optimal consumption of screened matter demands the suspension of disbelief; optimal consumption of witten matter demands the suspension of distractions. That suspension of distractions keeps critical minds from being conned into buying sheep which, in reality, are wolves made to appear to be sheep.

All this suspension of disbelief, as passive viewing continues to replace active reading as the popular way to acquire the information daily living requires, leads inevitably to the atrophy of critical reasoning, the faculty that distinguishes us in the animal kingdom.

Anybody who thinks the elevation of a reality TV character to the presidency, despite all the evidence that his true character is that of a cartoon hooligan, is a one-off event is deluded, sad to say. Of course people vote according to who candidates say they are, instead of according to who they are in reality.

But take heart gentle reader, and do not despair. Since we watched our way into the MAGArian nightmare, I promise you we can read our way out of it.

May I suggest you begin with Nixon’s Powell Memorandum? It begat the Heritage Foundation, which begat Project 2025, which has already begotten enough pink slips to make us rethink the errant pinko hysteria that swept Nixon into office in the first place! (Is this an instance of serial reasoning?)