Читать книгу The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools онлайн

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The intellectual tone of the community is set by a great newspaper, the Los Angeles “Times,” created by an unscrupulous accumulator of money. The “Times” has now grown enormously wealthy, but it still carries on in its founder’s spirit of hatred and calumny. It boasts of being the largest newspaper in the world—meaning that it prints the most advertisements. You pay ten cents for the Sunday edition, and have two or three pages of Associated Press dispatches with the life censored out of them; after that, you grope your way through a wilderness of commercialism. I stop and wonder, how can I give the reader an idea of the intellectual garbage upon which our Southern California population is fed. I pick up this morning’s paper, and find a cartoon on the front page, our daily hymn of hate against Soviet Russia; the cartoon is labeled in large letters: “Out of the Fryingpansky into the Fireovitch.” As the naturalist Agassiz could construct a whole animal from a piece of fossil bone, so you may comprehend a culture from that piece of wit.