american values, and the dim days of Operation Punchbowl.

Upon observing a Wall Street Journal Poll that reflects a lapsing of "American Values", Greg Bear, the science fiction pundit, observed that America had, to an extent, and for his own leisure, lost the narrative.  Such as it were, Greg Bear was just days ago talking about a church revival in America; does not all this reflect, not all, but some very pockets of peoples across the fruited plain?  I note with the Nashville kerflopple, it seems to feed a certain sense of horror; I break with this but to jeer at the commentators, and wonder earnestly, which of those American values they insist are losing ground?

Neither to bury nor praise, nor ask him to jump on my sword, I just wonder what cultural traditions and other things, are considered uniquely American?  I came from the public school tradition of primarily the 1990s, in which the phrase "melting pot" came at us at every year when we had pubic hair.

Such as it were, a group of people, paddling along against the current, and some with the current; as Bill told me, one can find a counter-current near the edge that would send would easily upstream, rather than downstream, and he said he had done that.

What is beholden to organization efficiencies or the ready identification of like-minded persons?  Is it the one where the Standard-bolt biker's wife is topless, and you know there is beer, or some such, or is it the old swinger's dog-whistles, alignments of various patio furniture in ways that give signal to the sympathetic that even all is to be shared, from the barrel of grease and flour, and all.

There was launched a fake super-secret initiative called "Punchbowl".  Of it, so much was mere rumor, and it was such that with the cloud of misinformation and the proliferation of so much purely junk data, not much was known by anyone, even the people said to have founded the project.  They dipped into their own bowls, and came up with nothing on their ice cream sticks, and they were having to ask the rumor-mongers that roamed the building of what they were supposed to actually be doing in the project; such as it was, such as it were, in the sunny happenstance, a particularly vacuous fusion of lies had become self-sustaining.

It was the days of the Pacific push, '42, or so, with vacuum tube robots and things like code-breaker typesetting machines with stacks upon stacks of flywheel discs, even a rumor of a "cloaking device" under development for naval vessels, and project leaders were at the mercy of a big-budget monstrosity that was sort of a "self-fulfilling prophecy": the very myth was in fact creating and advancing its own cause, adding to its mass, multiplying its density, till at once, if Pinnochio were a verb, the darn thing had seemed to have almost actually wished its own self into being.