I did not buy Mortensen’s book, though I looked it over at a bookstore and was not favorably impressed. I was skeptical of this man’s supposed success while others who worked to educate Afghan females were being threatened and murdered. I guess I was correct to be dubious.
People do want to be fooled. It all started with Ronnie Reagan, the biggest flim-flam artist of them all and the one who has done the most damage to any sort of decent human values in the last 50 years. Most of the greed and dishonesty in public life and the shamelessness about selfishness and ignorance can be traced back to him. Even the claim that he “won” the Cold War is nonsense. Gorbachev deserves more credit for that. Reagan would have gotten nowhere but into a nuclear war had he been up against a Stalin or a Brezhnev. People want to believe that virtue is easier than it really is, and to believe themselves virtuous when they are not. There will always be Reagans and Mortensens and religious phonies to oblige them.
