From Daniel Boorstin’s 1961 classic The Image:

Nowadays everybody tells us that what we need is more belief, a stronger and deeper and more encompassing faith. A faith in America and what we are doing. That may be true in the long run. What we need first and now is to disillusion ourselves. What ails us most is not what we have done with America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.

Speaking of missionaries, I guess the Mormons have a new trick going. One night last week when I was waiting to cross State, a guy appeared out of the corner of my vision and pressed a Book of Mormon card into my hand. He was in plainclothes, and he was flanked cleverly on both sides by two guys in the typical missionary garb. The theory, I guess, being that I’d be more likely not to resist the shill if the person performing it wasn’t dressed like a Mormon missionary.

Oh, yeah, I’ve had enough of the green T-shirted Jews for Jesus trying to shove their literature into my hand, too. They’re actually far more obnoxious than the Mormons. At least the Mormons don’t post themselves like sentries along every footpath on central campus so that you have to detour off onto the grass to get away from them.

There was a Jesus freak standing in the middle of the Diag at noon today railing against secular humanism and the evils of going to college, getting an education, and “getting ahead,” which he described as self-serving folly and as a sure road to hell. Sounded exactly like every line I was fed by fundie churches and fringe cults in my teenage years. I never understood how becoming an itinerant missionary and eschewing an undergraduate degree (and thus not being able to get a job and support myself) was supposed to fulfill God’s plan.

Somewhat incongruously, his gigantic hand-painted sign advertising Christ’s blood sacrifice was colored in garish shades of blue and maize.

It’s somewhat heartening in the midst of all of the media-fueled speculation about the political and philosophical leanings of today’s youth to see that some college kids are still just old-fashioned loud-mouthed lunkheaded party animals who live to throw monkey wrenches into the proceedings. When the preacher man was getting to the best part of his stemwinder about the evils of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, a couple of frat boys wandering by roared “HELL YEAH!” at the top of their lungs and pumped their fists in the air.

Not only did Johnny Ramone die today, but when I stopped during my hectic day to get a bite of lentil soup at the Rendezvous annex on South University, the kid behind the counter, as she was taking my order, said, “It sucks that all the great music was made the year I was born.”

I couldn’t resist. “What year was that?”

“1984,” she said.

And then she added, somewhat unnecessarily but very illustratively, “Blondie and Pat Benatar! WOO–HOO!”