journal features

sleepless after 9/11

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Vancouver, 2001.09.12

I was shocked to have a restless night, last night. Really restless. I think this business in the 'States must be effecting me more than I realized.

I'm sure - aside from the fact that she's not dead - that my mother would be rolling in her grave, but I have to admit I read The Economist. I don't know how this ever came to pass, but I read just about everything in it, when I pick up a copy. I must be some kind of closet conservative.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)