0801

August 1, 2022 

In bed around 9, up around 5, 5 pit stops overnight.

    Woke up thinking of "American Graffiti" which we watched last night for the first time, thinking back to its setting in 1962, 1963 when the characters were leaving high school and moving on to college (or not), background music of big hits from my high school and college years, thinking of how different life was for 'public school kids' who went to school with kids of the opposite sex, and Catholic school kids in our segregated (in all ways) schools named after various saints and deities and smothered in America's Irish Catholic sexually-repressed culture. Thinking of how Pat Boone, the avatar of wholesome Protestant clean sexuality (an oxymoron to Catholic kids) did 'covers' of all those great early rock tunes by Little Richard, Fats Domino, and others.

    Opened my laptop to go through my morning routine but saw Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" still residing in an open window.  How accurate his assessment was, how predictive of Donald Trump, the Republican Party, Qanon,  the January 6th insurrection and today.