"Greeley, Colorado, circa 1950 was the last place one might think to look for signs of American decadence."

"Its wide streets were dotted with churches, and there wasn’t a bar in the whole temperate town. But the courtly Qutb (COO-tub) saw things that others did not. He seethed at the brutishness of the people around him: the way they salted their watermelon and drank their tea unsweetened and watered their lawns. He found the muscular football players appalling and despaired of finding a barber who could give a proper haircut. As for the music: 'The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,' Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. 'It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.'"

From "A Lesson In Hate/How an Egyptian student came to study 1950s America and left determined to wage holy war," a 2006 article in Smithsonian, which I'm reading this morning as a result of the conversation we were having about "You Hate Leaf Blowers, Your Neighbor Uses Them: How One Town Seeks Middle Ground." I won't bother you with the logical links that connected these subjects.