Backward Ran the Progress, Until Reeled the Mind

From the early days of Time magazine in the 1920s, as quoted by Alan Brinkley in The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century,

“Can you afford to be labelled as a man from Main Street?” an early advertising leaflet asked potential Time subscribers. “Can you afford to be a man from Main Street? Civilization moves forward on a thousand fronts, business, art, politics, science, religion. You have only to ignore it, and you slip back again centuries in time. But can you afford to live in the dark ages?”

Of course, these days, as light bulbs are banned, energy prices are deliberately made to skyrocket, and technological and cultural regression promoted as a way of life, the 21st century reprimitivizing “progressive” asks, how can you afford not to?

Tangentially Related Update: Roger Kimball explains, “Why It’s OK for the U.S. Govt. to Burn Bibles But Condemn Burning the Koran.”

“F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind simultaneously was a mark of genius,” Roger writes. “If that were true, the U.S. government must be full of geniuses.”

Just ask them.