Responding to the message “Salinger is dead. Happy now?” His debut novel, King Dork is about a kid who, in an unavoidably Holden kinda way, hates everything about the cult of The Catcher in the Rye.
That said, unlike Tom, I didn’t hate “The Catcher in the Rye” when it was first thrust upon me by numerous parents, teachers, priests, counselors, and other authority figures. I knew I was supposed to revere it, to identify with Holden, and to keep it close to my bosom and all that. “Finally,” I would say, obediently following the script provided by helpful, smiling, over-eager adult facilitators, “someone who understands…” Maybe I even kind of meant it. And they would pat me on the head, or on the back, depending on how tall they were in relation to me. Eventually, though, I began to wonder. What does it mean when you’re in a room full of people who all have the same, exact opinion on something with little or no divergence? It’s kind of creepy, whatever it means.
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
March 18, 2014 at 8:28 pm
Raffael
Humans are possibly exrniteg a tiny influence on the Earth’s vast atmosphere. As the most adaptive species in history will will respond to the resulting small, gradual changes to come just as we have to the changes we have encountered in the past. Free citizens participating in free markets are far more likely to produce good results than any imposed regime could possibly hope to. Climate Change is can never justify the totalitarian responses being offered in response to it.