My step-dad, Greg, is one of the coolest and smartest people that I have ever met. He is literally a genius (although he won't let you in on this little secret), he is hilarious, and he is opinionated without being obnoxious or unlikable. He is a phlegmatic, so only on occasion does he become angry or irrational. The bad thing about having a personality like the one he has is that everyone laughs at you when you become angry or irrational.
For example, he cannot put things together without throwing something across the room or shouting a profanity. I hide my smile and my chuckle to myself and only later do I dare tell him that I was laughing at him. I really do understand the frustration he feels when putting something together. Everything is made in China and China makes nothing but crap that either doesn't work from the get-go or falls apart within the first five minutes of completion. To make things worse, they OWN the United States. Nice, right? Communists who make crap own us. Wonderful.
Ok, so now that you understand what Greg is like, I can go into my story. We were all outside this morning enjoying a coffee and a scone with our books when something sparked a conversation. We started to talk about "All the President's Men" and how I have never read the book nor seen the movie. I was talking about how much I love the Washington Post and I mentioned that schools don't properly educate kids about the Cold War and Watergate. In fact, anything that I have learned about Watergate has been on my own. You learn in school that Nixon was impeached, but you don't really understand why because there's only half a page dedicated to the subject in our history books. Anyway, somehow we started talking about how the journalists who uncovered the Watergate scandal must have felt. I said that I can imagine the excitement that they felt and that they were probably very fearful having that kind of information in their possession. This conversation turned into a discussion about scandals today, and eventually it turned into a discussion about crappy books by corrupt politicians and their mistresses.
I have known Greg for a long time, which is why it's amazing that I never knew about one of his habits, or should I say silent protests. It turns out that any time Greg is in a bookstore and he sees a book by someone he can't stand, he turns the book upside-down and around. Newt Gingrich? Gets the flip. Ann Coulter? Gets the flip. Sometimes he flips just the display, but sometimes he flips the entire collection! I can just see him in the bookstore, grumbling and flipping in silent protest. Apparently he has always done this! My mom says that sometimes she sees books flipped in a store and she thinks "Greg was here".
I told him that I was going to write about his little movement and he said "Please do! I am waiting for it to catch on!" If we all did it, wouldn't it make some kind of difference? We could slowly silence the voices of people who shouldn't be writing and getting book deals. On that note, I have to go now. I am headed to Barnes and Noble to attack Snooki's bestseller.
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