March 17, 2007

On the road

for a little r&r. I promised Tony a blog post on history and conservative evangelicals, but that might have to wait. More tomorrow.

One note. on the road today, I noticed just how many people drive gigantic SUVs. Navigators, Suburbans, Escalades, they are amazingly popular even with gas at over 2.50 or so. Al Gore may be winning some hearts and minds, but it is obvious that for many, gas is damn near as cheap as it was before.

Sigh.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope the post might address a book I saw the other night -- A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus' Great Discovery to the War on Terror. While it's not explicitly evangelical, and frankly seems more economically deterministic in its approach, the nature of coalition politics suggests that it is likely to become the favorite of conservatives of other stripes, including evangelicals.

It would be interesting to read this side by side with Zinn, Johnson, or a "standard" text to help students realize that historians select and interpret (relevant or not to the topic at hand and the research question as explicitly or implicitly framed) and use logical reasoning and critical thinking skills to draw conclusions about the past (either Novick's Noble Dream or David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies would be great here).

The authors (or more properly the publisher) seem a bit disingenuous in calling the book 'Fair and Balanced' not least because this accuses other historians of bias while claiming to be 'objective' themselves.

Tony said...

Streak,

I remember a couple of years ago our state Baptist rag ran a story, "What would Jesus drive?" Aside from being pathetically anachronistic, it drew the conclusion, based upon imposed presuppositions, that Jesus would most likely drive a Ford Fiesta.

I have always figured if somebody can afford one of those road behemoths, they can afford the gas. A good friend of mine drives a Durango and it costs easily $100 per fill-up.

I drive a Saturn, so there ya go.

P M Prescott said...

If you consider that since gasoline was only .25 per gallon, which was quite a while ago. That inflation has raised the price of everything by 100%. A $5,000 car now costs $50,000, a $10,00 house now runs well over $100,000.
That would make the price of gasoline and $2.50 and even $3.00 equivalent to the $.25 of the early 70's. When gas hits $5.00 a gallon it'll have the same impact on the economy as when it rose to $.50 in 1975. That's when everyone will get rid of the gas guzzlers, or switch to alternative fuels.