Del Granger sent me a link and short text that said, “This passed, of course.”
It was a link to a series of pdfs detailing a House joint resolution at the Montana State Legislature website. This particular resolution had just been approved in committee and is awaiting a floor vote. It’s the reason I’m routing the trip through Helena. I’m in Helena now and will give you a report soon.
Meanwhile, coffee in Missoula. Near the rental car agency there’s a big shopping center and I was surprised to see a massive Barnes and Noble, open for business at 9am. The guy greeted me at the door and I couldn’t help but say, “A major book store still in business? How do you guys compete with Amazon?” It was one of those yuuuge, circa ‘90s B&N designed for maximum browsing and relaxation. Missoulians must have money to burn because I couldn’t fathom paying these prices for books. A simple, medium-length Hemingway title in paperback ran around 18 bucks, if memory serves. Hardbound books on the New Releases rack ran between 35 and 50 bucks. I had some time before I had to pick up my car so I decided I would take it easy and stay a while.
A couple of these titles sounded interesting and without reading them I can’t tell you how bold they might be in venturing beyond the politically correct Overton Window. But once you’ve been down the rabbit hole normie books just don’t have much appeal. It’s like watching a Hollywood movie. Even if the acting and dialogue are pretty good, it’s all been pre-approved by the narrative pushers. I’m guessing nothing that really challenges the established order or upsets the power structure gets on the Barnes and Noble front rack. Now if they had a rack called Banned by Amazon I’d be interested!
Next I wandered into the zone of famous writers of old. After looking at the price of some classics that can be bought for next to nothing as a used book on Amazon, or even free on kindle, I wandered toward the magazine section. On the way, I found a rack completely dedicated on both sides to Taylor Swift.
This is where 13-yr. old daughter is meant to hang out while mom is over in Romance and Dad’s flipping through Guns & Ammo. You fools! Get young Madison away from there!
It’s pretty clear to me that 35 yr. old Tay Tay’s primary assignment from Satan is to convince young girls that rejecting motherhood while you, well, can have children, is totally normal. Here Stefan Molyneux shares my sentiment, 5 years ago:
Of course that tweet got a lot of angry responses. Moly didn’t back down.
I realized I’d spent too much time at the Taylor Swift rack, almost a minute in fact. Enough of that girly fluff, I said, and ventured toward the 50-foot long magazine rack.
Ugh: that’s like one of the titles above in the first photo, The Missing Thread (“A dazzlingly ambitious history of the ancient world that places women at the center”)
Where are the manly magazines? Let’s see. Ah. This one looks like something with adventure and class. I’ll just randomly flip it open…
Yes, let’s go skiing dressed like that. The photo on the right made me laugh and gag so much I had to show it to a lady looking at cooking magazines. I asked, “Do you know any men who would be caught dead dressed like this, in Montana?”
-Oh, gross. That is pathetic. NO!
I laughed. Then she said, “Except for Big Sky. You could see that outfit at Big Sky.”
After the magazines I figured I had better patronize the place somehow. I wasn’t about to pay 25 bucks for a Penguin Classic that I could get for 5 as a mass-market paperback on Amazon, so I broke my no-Starbucks rule and had a coffee. They did have a cool mural with a bunch of big-shot authors.
I liked the mural. They really made these guys look like a serious, brooding bunch. Kafka is positively goulish. The only two guys I would consider depicted as handsome are Hemingway and this guy…oh, Langston Hughes. I guess I never knew he had such debonair latin-lover looks. He looks like an international correspondent with Italian, Peruvian and Turk blood in a cafe in Buenos Aires during the Peron years. I guess I mistakenly just figured he had typical African-American features. Oh well, you learn something new at B&N every time.
Next: Helena
I can relate to what you're saying about Hollywood movies. When I was married my wife liked to watch one a day so I usually accompanied her. It's true, occasionally there was a good one that had minor breaks in the narrative, but as a whole, Hollywood seems to have become mainly a subsidiary of the cia. I stopped watching Hollywood films almost 20 years ago. Now they seem like things made for children, they are so cliche and formulaic as well as harmful in the sense that they introduce elements of their agenda to get us psychologically used to them. As for the bookstores it's a shame that Borders went under. There's a local bookstore here in Milwaukee that I go into from time to time. But it's the same phenomenon as with Hollywood. It's generally a Jewish controlled field where they are simply feeding us mind poison. I did however by the Holocaust Industry by Norman Finkelstein recently. It was a whopping $23 for a small paperback book. I didn't buy it thinking that there was going to be any honesty regarding the holohoax, but I thought I would mine it for outrageous statements made by Jewish people which make them look ridiculous and then make a program out of it called Jewish voices on the Holocaust. One thing that came out quite early in the book was that it was written with the participation and input of Noam Chomsky who Miles Mathis has outed as a CIA agent. So as usual they are misdirecting. They are trying to sound like the reasonable Jews who are incensed about the huckstering of the coarser members of their tribe. But it's all a dog and pony show, because the sanctity of Jewish suffering is never questioned. No mention of the Catholic priests that Hitler threw in jail. No mention that Hitler himself was Jewish and part of the dialectic of opposites that they always set up to render us so confused that we can't act coherently.
I visit Barnes & Noble occasionally to look at a book I'm thinking of buying, then go to Amazon to get it--at half the price. Sometimes, I buy books there to give as Christmas presents because I waited too long beforehand, in the same sense that, at the last minute, jewelry is always nice and acceptable.