Book dossier

Chicken Little Agenda

by Robert G. Williscroft

The Chicken Little Agenda is loosely organized around seventy columns in the Thrawn Rickle series the author originally wrote in response to his sense that the general public was just not getting it: The guy at the corner gas station, the Idaho lumberjack, the small town school bus driver, and – for that matter – newspaper editors and college professors, were systematically being misled by a Chicken Little mentality that insisted the sky was falling every time the word radiation appeared in print, whenever global warming or the ozone layer was mentioned, or whenever an act of terrorism took place. The original columns were published in various newspapers and periodicals in the Northwest and Southern California during the late 1980s and early 1990s, although much of it has appeared either updated or as new material within the last few years. Although politically pertinent at the time of its publication, the original material is timeless, as pertinent and fresh today as when written. The current material is, of course, as timely as today’s and tomorrow’s headlines. The author’s eclectic interests and broad experience have ideally prepared him to drop Chicken Little on the spin doctors who terrify the general public with their dire predictions of immanent disaster. We may no longer huddle in our backyard bomb shelters like our parents during the 1950s, but we spend millions of personal dollars “protecting” ourselves from a vast entourage of things we sincerely believe will harm us (after all, Carl Sagan said…), and we spend billions in tax dollars solving “problems” that exist primarily in the minds of agenda-driven, self-appointed experts who have managed to convince themselves and us that that acorn was a precursor to the fall of heaven itself.