As I do each year, I rescue hundreds of books the local public library offers up for yard sale prices. If they cannot be sold, they are hauled to the county waste disposal.
Arrgghh...I grabbed up about 400 books, and after I read through them, I will give them away.
And the autobiography of Shirley Temple Black, CHILD STAR, happened to be within reach on the heap of "trash".
This book was published in 1988. I wanted to read about dancing, about Bo Jangles, and just get some idea about what being a child star might be like. I certainly had little interest in her republican politics.
That changed with this paragraph on p. 3, describing her parents, Gertrude and George, and their financial circumstances in 1927:
"Their stucco bungalow at 948-24th Street in Santa Monica was small, but boasted a radio, elevating the Temples amonth the one-third of Americans so blessed. Babe Ruth was going to hit sixty home runs. Amelia Earhart, a slip of a girl with the same middle name as his wife's, had flown solo from Newfoundland to Wales. Americans were on the moove. Everywhere there was a sense of vitality, a heady, reckless spirit along what seemed an endless road of good times. That a third of American income funneled into pockets of only 5 percent of our population did not trouble George, any more than the national avalanche of goods and services which increasingly neither he nor anyone could long afford to buy. The rich had cash. The poor had credit. He had a good job as manager of a California Bank branch. Financial credit was a benign convenience, not an ugly monster poised to pounce."
The Reagan Revolution was going full tilt when she wrote this.
Republicans are not stupid.
They are just bought.