I've been working the closing shift recently, under the watch of Giovanni's crazy-religious assistant manager. To her credit, she's toned down a little over the past few years — though she's still a dead ringer for Peggy Hill.

Our inevitable discussion of religion went surprisingly well. It was Saturday night, and we'd been really busy so it was taking unusually long to close up. She asked me if I had to get up for church tomorrow, I said no.

I think she's whatever religion Jubb is. In any case, her Sunday plans were so obvious that I didn't bother to return the question.

She asked me if my parents went to church, and I explained that, being Catholics, they go whenever they feel guilty enough to attend. She laughed. After all, I wasn't making fun of her religion.

I stand by my assertion that anti-Catholicism is one of our nation's most politically correct forms of bigotry. But I digress.

There was a convenient pause, and I outed myself as a lazy atheist. Not that I think atheists are obligated to have meetings or anything; I just feel that Nietzsche — what with his quixotic search for a moral system not dependent on the Judeo-Christian values — makes the rest of us look lazy.

She took the "lazy atheist" thing pretty well, but I could sense something like doubt in her inward look.

Too bad about Dan. He was such a nice boy…

Of course, if I climbed out of the ivory tower (or "Lawrence Bubble", as my fellow collegians have dubbed our collective delusion) a little more often, I'd realize how rare unadulterated atheism actually is.

In fact, our country is a whole lot crazier than I'd've ever imagined. I stumbled upon this article a few days ago, and I'm still a bit shocked:

Most Americans take Bible stories literally

Since I suspect you won't follow my link, here's a damning quote:

An ABC News poll released [February 15th] found that 61 percent of Americans believe the account of creation in the Bible's book of Genesis is "literally true" rather than a story meant as a "lesson."

Whether people are actually this fundamentalist or simply intellectually lazy enough to accept the miraculous without giving it much thought, I expected a little more from the prols on this one.

I'd always thought they were just keeping up appearances, like that sham nun in DeLillo's otherwise middling White Noise.

But I was wrong. We even have fundamentalist paleontologists.

My one consolation is that professed Catholics were less likely than Protestants to hold fundamentalist beliefs. While the Church (hah!) has taken a more metaphorical approach lately, I'd rather attribute the difference to "lapsed" Catholics who, like me, believe that you can never really shake a Catholic upbringing.

But wait, there's more. We're reading less and less. Last year, around 44% of Americans did not read a book of any kind.

I probably sound elitist. Few people have as much free time as I do. But I think that many of them are like my little brother Matt, who probably hasn't read a book for fun in years. They have free time, but choose to spend it in less enlightening, more social ways.

The recent proliferation and success of angled reporting in this country suggests that people don't like to have their assumptions challenged; they'll seek out the sources that fit best their worldview.

They're lazy in probably the only way I'm not.

Books of any sort put another perspective in one's head, and even works by the same author can lack the ideological consistency (and easily-parroted blurbs) of the Fox News Channel or a Moore-u-mentry.

You risk being convinced of something you didn't believe, when you read a book. So what does this tell us?

We could be heading towards a more personalized world, where an increase in information is joined with a stockpiling of unchallenged assumptions, prepackaged to suit you.

Books are unwelcome, in that world. Ah, to be the ghost of literature…

And if alliteracy and fundamentalism were to combine?

Well, I suppose Luther would be spinning in his grave, for one. But presumably some omnibenevolent being would step in long before that happened.

(Come to think of it, shouldn't all these Protestants be reading their precious bibles? That's a book, I'm sure it is. I guess they do think it's easier when the priest tells them what's what.)

Of course, it's not just Red America that's becoming more polarized and less open-minded…