Chamblee54

In 1920, a former journalist named Warren Harding ran for President. The slogan of his campaign was “A return to normalcy”. Mr. Harding, who had previously coined the phrase “founding fathers”, won the election. Many consider Warren Harding to be a very bad POTUS.
Go ahead 93 years, and look at facebook. There is an eye catching graphic. “IF YOU CAN’T EXPLAIN IT TO A SIX YEAR OLD, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND IT YOURSELF.” ALBERT EINSTEIN WHAT IS NORMALCY IN AN ABNORMAL SOCIETY?
Wikiquotes says this quote is “misattributed”. Credit/blame is given to several other people. The explainee is sometimes said to be your grandmother, or a barmaid. There is an account of Dr. Einstein saying something similar in a conversation. In a court of law, this is considered hearsay.
Is this normalcy? To publish beautiful images, based on dubious quote? Even if a famous person did say it, does crediting a more famous person make it more true? Maybe the whole thing is just another example of a beautiful medium, with no message. Only if your grandmother is a six year old barmaid.
This visit to Zuckerland is interrupted by a flash and a beep. There is a message in the inbox. You read it, and type a reply. When you hit the send button, you see this: ” _____ is using an app to chat. To message ____, you need to change your settings to let friends who use apps see if you’re online. Would you like to allow friends using other apps to see your online state?”
Moving along, a friend is “sharing” a bit of text. After a couple of sentences, PG realizes that he has seen this text before. It is about how 545 people made life tough for 300 million. If you absolutely have to read the latest version, here it is. It is too late to sign the petition.
Charley Reese was a writer for the Orlando Sentinel. He wrote a column in 1984 that started it all. (Oldtimers might recall when 1984 was in the far off future, when Big Brother ran everything.) The column was revised in 1995, in time for the internet to introduce it to normalcy. Mr. Reese retired from the Sentinel in 2001, and wrote a nationally syndicated column for King Features until 2008.
Health issues are cited in the last column as a reason for retiring. Five years later, Mr. Reese is still with us. The last column says that the election of a black man as POTUS is a good thing. This thought might induce apoplexy in many who share the facebook version of the last column.
The Orlando Sentinel also refuses to die. There was a 2011 article about the column column. The reporter caught up with Charlie Reese. “I call it the Frankenstein column, That’s one of the problems with the Internet. Once something goes on the Internet, people rewrite.”
Mr. Reese is surprised that the column gets praised as a rare moment of wisdom and insight. “It’s a fifth-grade civics lesson; that’s all that column was,” he said. Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.