I am reading Bill Bryson's Thunderbolt Boy. His writing is fully of mild sarcasm, supposing funny wisdom, which makes you think he is almost afraid of offending someone. Hardly my cup of tea but I had nothing else in hand at the moment, oh well, an easy read to kill time during the night.
In this book he is mainly talking about his childhood in Iowa in the 50's. The food situation is scarily terrible, I mean, people's palates didn't get proper development after the great depression. They only respond to burns and ice cream. Almost everything is good for you, processed food is good for you. Frozen vegetables is good for you. Most doctors smokes Camels, so Camel ciggerates must be good for you. Ice cream makes your bond strong, and people went to Las Vegas to see the atomic bomb testing, so close that they could feel the earth trembling beneath their feet and the radioactive cloud flew over their head, that's good for the picnic.
Everything was exciting, the colour TV and fridge. Scentists reported that they can send missles to the moon carrying letters, allegedly an brand new way to deliver message. The whole nation cheered.
This reminds me a lot of communist China. We laughed at those stories during the great leap, in which the nation fell into the huge craziness to grow the productivity. Funny statistics gathered at the time such as the number of herd grew 10 fold in a year. That's a great deal of similarity of sentiments of that and of America in the 50s.
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