The size of the Texas and California/New York State markets for schoolbooks, I am given to understand, explains in part the craven vanilla banality of school textbooks, as editor/writers of these doorstops, er, textbooks, try the impossible course of navigating between the extremes of Texican patriotic fundamentalism (no evolution! reverence for God and the US military! dead white men!) and California/New York liberal progressivism (mucho multiculturalism! watered-down feminism! political correctness up the wazoo!), trying to satisfy both markets while offending nobody. Texas may not be highbrow, but there are a lot of schools and a lot of students on that state, and an infamously ferocious and powerful textbook purchasing board that is always alert to any temptation to succumb to left wing decadence.
--- Carl Remick <carlremick at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 7, 2007 2:26 PM, Dennis Claxton
> <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > B. wrote:
> >
> > >As far as a band called Texas Schoolbook
> Depository
> > >(which is now a museum)
> >
> > That's where I'd been when I had the traffic
> trouble I was talking
> > about. I bought a Jackie Kennedy by Warhol
> refrigerator magnet at
> > the gift shop. They have the room Oswald shot from
> set up just as it
> > was in photos from the Warren Commission report.
> Pretty
> > spooky.
>
> The thing I've always found most mysterious about
> the Texas Schoolbook
> Depository is its sheer size. How could a place
> like Texas, globally
> unsurpassed as a hotbed of anti-intellectualism,
> possibly possess
> enough school texts to fill a seven-story building
> as bulky as the
> Texas Schoolbook Depository? It's easier to imagine
> a platoon or more
> of snipers on the famous grassy knoll than to
> envision Texas needing
> that much room to stash schoolbooks.
>
> Carl
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