When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

by John Ganz

The paleo aesthetic was American Gothic: white-sided Presbyterian and Congregational churches in small towns; stern, industrious folk; farmers, homesteaders, and frontiersmen. Added to this was the myth of the gallant South and the Lost Cause. Many were Catholic traditionalists, but they praised the character-annealing rigors of the Protestant ethic. In the paleo junk shop of discarded historical forms, the dour Puritan Roundhead made a strange peace with the chivalrous Southern cavalier. Their imagination resembles nothing so much as the rainy-day transports of a boy who lines up all his toy soldiers from different periods in a grand alliance—here’s a knight, there’s a cowboy, here’s Davy Crockett, there’s a Special Forces commando.