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A review by kevin_shepherd
The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State by Russell Cobb
4.0
Buckle of the Bible Belt
“From the massive legalized theft of Native land in the early twentieth century, to a decades-long conspiracy of silence about one of the country’s worst acts of racial violence, to a former governor who believes a statewide day of Christian prayer is a solution for social problems and a former attorney general who continues to deny the reality of climate change, the state of Oklahoma was built and is still maintained on a bedrock of lies.”
In spite of the fact that Oklahoma consistently ranks near the worst in the quality of public education, teacher salaries, violent crime, teenage pregnancy, suicide, adult obesity, child obesity, criminal incarcerations, and criminal executions, Russell Cobb still finds a few slivers of optimism buried within the Sooner State’s buttload of embarrassing statistics. I’m not going to dwell on the positives here because (#1) spoiler alert! and (#2) they might prompt a spike in secular immigration and I kinda like being the lone, vegetarian, liberal, closeted-atheist lurking in this theocratic, MAGA-capped, petro-christian monoculture. Mum’s the word.
“From the massive legalized theft of Native land in the early twentieth century, to a decades-long conspiracy of silence about one of the country’s worst acts of racial violence, to a former governor who believes a statewide day of Christian prayer is a solution for social problems and a former attorney general who continues to deny the reality of climate change, the state of Oklahoma was built and is still maintained on a bedrock of lies.”
In spite of the fact that Oklahoma consistently ranks near the worst in the quality of public education, teacher salaries, violent crime, teenage pregnancy, suicide, adult obesity, child obesity, criminal incarcerations, and criminal executions, Russell Cobb still finds a few slivers of optimism buried within the Sooner State’s buttload of embarrassing statistics. I’m not going to dwell on the positives here because (#1) spoiler alert! and (#2) they might prompt a spike in secular immigration and I kinda like being the lone, vegetarian, liberal, closeted-atheist lurking in this theocratic, MAGA-capped, petro-christian monoculture. Mum’s the word.