Imaginary friends

DougJ at Balloon Juice observes how often pundits rely on imaginary friends as sources for wildly inaccurate social observations

It’s amazing that in this so-called information age such a huge amount of our discourse—not just the Beck/Palin part of it but the serious, respectable part—is driven by reminiscences of hunchbacks, magical dolphins, nonexistent Applebee’s salad bars, Stagger Lee-style cab drivers, and so on. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why this is so. Bob Somerby’s been at it for ten years and he doesn’t seem to have gotten anywhere with it. It’s probably something for anthropologists of the future to sort out.