Heck, when I was growing up, just being a nerd was enough to catch flak. I was once literally called a "poindexter" by a shirtless yokel while travelling by tr

Heck, when I was growing up, just being a nerd was enough to catch flak. I was once literally called a "poindexter" by a shirtless yokel while travelling by train though the Midwest! Granted, there's always been an undercurrent of counter-culture in America. The Puritans had their witches. But by the 50's at least it was all buttoned up tight, and then exploded in the 60's and 70's, recoiled in the 80's, then everybody took a decade off in the 90's, and somehow in the 00's and 10's we all lost our fwcking minds. The thing about mainstream American culture is that it pretty much had been under the thumb of mass media and religion. That's why the whole "fake news" attack is so devastating: our news has been fake. I read Noam Chomsky at an impressionable age and I recall the realization that we (in the USA) were living in what I called a "media blackout". Anything "they" didn't want you to know was simply omitted. It worked so much better than the Russian system. But only until the Internet hit...