[By the time I had written Section IV, I had to concede most of this post summarizes, abridges, and adds on to parts of An Open  Letter to an Open Minded Progressive.  Also, it took until Section V to actually get to my thesis.]

“A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” – often attributed to Mark Twain

“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” – often attributed to Joseph Goebbels

I

A while ago I wrote about a moment when a friend described my research for my blog posts as “sitting in his living room.”  That wasn’t the first time I had thought about the amateur nature of my writing, and it won’t be my last.  I suspect most of my fellow bloggers are in a similar position; smart, reflective, and not credentialed in any way in…

[Going to tie a few seemingly unconnected thoughts together here.  Buckle up.]

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In middle school, I had a history class that began with some historiography.  We learned about different ways history had been portrayed and understood.  The gist was that the Great Man Theory of history, in which powerful, capable individuals were the force which led their peoples to their destinies, was outmoded.  In its place, modern historians looked at historical events as confluences of many events, situations, conditions, etc, and this was more scientific, accurate, and meaningful history.

Tied into this was discussions of variations on the theme of divine right to rule, of which I remember precisely three concepts: traditional Western divine right, and the Chinese concepts of Mandate of Heaven and Filial Piety.  These tied back into the historiography in that these three concepts provided socio-religious explanations for a certain power structure, just as…

*I displaced Amanda’s monthly guest post yesterday for the character blog tour, so I’m putting it up today.  I’ll add one thing to what she says below — well, a few — when my kids were in elementary, there was a city program where they were given incentives to read.  Read x pages get a burger.  Read x pages get a movie ticket.  I never let them participate in the program.  Why not (besides meanness?)  Because I didn’t want them to think of reading as a chore you had to be compensated for. This is the mentality I keep running into, even from thirty somethings “reading is a chore and you need to give me stuff so I’ll read.” For some this becomes “reading is a chore, so I’ll read only ‘improving’ materials. And thus we come to writers who think that writing is kind of school work and that…