The great unraveling …

… PJ Media — The Decline of Literate Thought. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Then we have the fiasco of former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, who delivered a speech to the military base in Gagetown, New Brunswick, on April 14, 2004, in which he twice praised the Canadian effort in the 1944 invasion ofNorway. One is also reminded of President Obama’s notorious gaffes — the Austrian language, the 57 (or 58) states, the identification of a new state called Eau Claire, Hawaii as part of Asia, the Muslim history of Cordoba set in the period of the Inquisition, etc. Clearly, the failure of both memory and knowledge has become epidemic. One recalls, too, in this connection the British company Umbro, which outfits the English national soccer team, that marketed the Zyklon running shoe, unaware until controversy erupted of the Zyklon B poison gas the Nazis used in the concentration camps. “We are sure that the name was not meant to cause offense,” explained an Umbro spokesman, whose own name is Nick Crook. No less disturbing is a student paper I read in which the writer claimed that “man descended from the trees around two hundred years ago and experienced the Enlightenment.”