[Geckomlis]

Originally posted by PvK:
Don't confuse the book, and the words of a character inside the book, unless it's written by someone a lot denser than Kurt Vonnegut!

Sometimes writers use half-truths, or un-truths in various ways, to induce readers to actually question and think about what they are reading.

PvK

I could not agree more. And that was my point also – some of those quotes from The Economist are caricatures or half-truths. Polls and statistics are not value-neutral. Question what you read and evaluate it critically – always!

*sigh*, now if I could just get my students to practice that habit of mind…


By the way, for anyone that is interested:
The character of Howard W. Campbell, Jr. first appeared in Vonnegut's book “Mother Night”. He is a young American playwright living in Nazi Germany in the late '30s, recruited as a spy. “He becomes the Tokyo Rose of the Third Reich, the voice of a passionate anti-Semite mocking the Allies while reaffirming Aryan supremacy, all the time passing along coded Messages edited into his copy to the American Command.

Fifteen years after the war, he's living in a run-down Greenwich Village apartment, an icon of American White Supremacists, being pursued for different reasons by both Israeli and Soviet agents, and unable to prove his true role in the war because, as he was forewarned, the U.S. government will never acknowledge it.”
http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/vonnegut/m...t/latimes.html

Gecko